Hurricane Fiona strengthened to a powerful Category 4 storm on Wednesday as it headed toward Bermuda after carving a destructive path through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where most were without power and up to eight people might have died from the storm.
After making landfall in Puerto Rico on Sunday, Fiona caused devastating flooding and landslides on the island. Over the next two days, the storm gathered steam as it barreled into the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
By Wednesday, Fiona was packing winds as high as 130 miles per hour (215 km per hour) and was expected to strengthen as it moved north toward Bermuda, though the current forecast does not see Bermuda taking a direct hit, the National Hurricane Center said. It could reach Canada's Atlantic coast on Friday.
Eric Blake, acting branch chief for the U.S. government agency in Miami, said Bermuda would see high surf, storm surges, heavy rainfall and powerful winds even if Fiona kept on its current path and passed to the west of the island.
"Hopefully, the core of the storm will stay west, but it could still jog east and hit Bermuda," Blake said, adding that the U.S. East Coast would experience large swells and rip currents as the storm churns toward Canada.
"This will be a big deal up there," he told Reuters, referring to Fiona's track toward Canada's Atlantic provinces of Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
In Puerto Rico, where 40% of the island's 3.3 million residents were still without water and three-fourths were lacking power, authorities were trying to determine the scale of the destruction and start rebuilding.
At least eight deaths were under investigation as possibly caused by Fiona, including a sick 4-month-old infant whose mother struggled to get to the hospital due to blocked roads, Dr. Maria Conte Miller, director of the Institute of Forensic Sciences, said in a roundtable on Tuesday.
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has so far attributed four deaths to the storm in Puerto Rico. A fifth person was killed in Guadeloupe earlier in the week.
For many Puerto Rico residents, the memory of Hurricane Maria in 2017 is still fresh. Some 3,000 people died in that Category 5 storm, which left the entire island without electricity for a week.
Marylou Maldonado, 45, a saleswoman from the town of Camuy in northwestern Puerto Rico, said water was restored to her residence on Tuesday, but that the governor and energy provider failed to fulfill their promise to restore power to her region.
"People are under a lot of stress," she said. "Here in this area, the crisis is emotional. It is emotional because of the frustration of not having electricity and that we are being lied to."
'BOUTS OF SHOWERS'
The Bermuda Weather Service has issued a tropical storm warning for the British territory, 600 miles (966 km) east of the U.S. state of North Carolina, as Fiona tracks to the west of the archipelago. Hurricane-force winds are a possibility depending on the storm's path, it said.
"Outer rain bands will sweep into the region bringing bouts of showers, thunderstorms, and heavy rain," the weather service said in its forecast for Thursday and Friday.
An estimated 1.07 million homes and businesses remained without power in Puerto Rico by midday on Wednesday, according to LUMA Energy, which has said full restoration to all 1.5 million customers could take several days.
In the neighboring Dominican Republic, Fiona triggered severe flooding that limited road access to villages, forced 12,500 people from their homes and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people.
Fiona was the first hurricane to score a direct hit on the Dominican Republic since Jeanne left severe damage in the east of the country in 2004.
U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra declared a public health emergency for Puerto Rico on Tuesday night, freeing up federal funds and equipment to assist the island.
