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Tropical Storm Karen’s Rains Begin to Soak Puerto Rico
Earthquake Strikes Off Puerto Rico’s Coast as Island Braces for Storm
(2 months later)
Tropical Storm Karen began to drench Puerto Rico on Tuesday with heavy rain that is forecast to continue on Wednesday and could cause flash flooding and mudslides.
A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck off the coast of Puerto Rico on Monday night, the authorities said, but there were no immediate reports of deaths, injuries or damage.
With up to 30,000 survivors of Hurricane Maria still living under leaky tarps, the authorities were on alert, warning that the destructive potential of Karen should not be underestimated, even at relatively lower wind speeds of about 45 miles per hour.
The earthquake struck 44 miles north of Puerto Rico and at a depth of about six miles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The quake comes as the island’s residents are bracing for Tropical Depression Karen, which is expected to bring heavy rains and possible flooding and landslides on Tuesday.
“Weather conditions are going to worsen,” Gov. Wanda Vázquez cautioned as she urged Puerto Ricans to get off the roads and out of rough seas and rising rivers. Employers, she said, should let workers stay home.
Some people in Puerto Rico were jolted awake by the earthquake, The Associated Press reported. But Kiara Hernández, a spokeswoman for Puerto Rico’s Emergency Management Agency, told the news agency that there were no immediate reports of damages.
Puerto Ricans’ nerves had been jangled by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rattled the island on Monday night. The quake hit at 11:23 p.m. local time, striking 49 miles off the northwest coast, the United States Geological Survey said, and was followed by a series of smaller aftershocks, including at least two on Tuesday night that unnerved people again.
There was no tsunami risk from the earthquake or from three smaller aftershocks that hit the same region soon after, the National Weather Service’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on Twitter.
Elmer Román, Puerto Rico’s secretary of public safety, said there were no reports of injuries or any significant damage. Local news outlets reported a water pipe broke in Mayagüez, in western Puerto Rico.
As of 2 a.m. on Tuesday, Karen was about 150 miles south of Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, and moving northward at eight miles per hour with maximum sustained winds of about 35 miles per hour, according to NOAA.
Attention soon returned to Karen, a storm that bears little resemblance to Maria, which devastated the island two years ago when it was nearly a Category 5 hurricane, with winds of 155 miles per hour. Hurricane Dorian, this season’s only major storm so far, mostly spared the island.
NOAA said Karen was expected to pass near or over Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands on Tuesday and that it could strengthen into a tropical storm later in the day.
Karen’s storm clouds were forecast to cover most of Puerto Rico. Eighty-two emergency shelters opened in some vulnerable communities.
Two years ago, Puerto Rico was struck by Hurricane Maria, which killed 3,000 people and left much of the island without electricity. The storm precipitated a financial and political crisis for the United States territory.
The combination of Karen and the lingering effects of Hurricane Maria was already posing logistical problems.
The Puerto Rican island municipality of Vieques has been without a fully functioning hospital since Maria destroyed its public medical facility in 2017. So when a newborn on Vieques got sick on Tuesday morning, the Puerto Rico National Guard had to be called on to fly the baby in a helicopter to a hospital on the big island.
A 15-year-old girl also had to be medevaced from Vieques on Monday night, said Rafael Rodríguez Mercado, the health secretary.
“People are saying, ‘It’s just a tropical storm,’ but there’s no such thing as ‘just a tropical storm,’” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “Tropical storms can create a lot of havoc.”
In Puerto Rico, mayors said they heeded emergency managers’ calls to clear storm drains to prepare for rain and prevent flash flooding. Several times on Tuesday afternoon, flood warnings issued by the National Weather Service flashed in red on local television.
The core of Tropical Storm Karen approached southeastern Puerto Rico late on Tuesday afternoon, but the worst rains would come afterward, on the back side of the storm. Isolated areas, especially in Puerto Rico’s central mountainous region, could get up to 10 inches of rain. Those conditions could create life-threatening mudslides, meteorologists warned.
“Puerto Rico is prepared,” Ms. Vázquez insisted.
Ferries to Vieques and Culebra, which are between the big island and the United States Virgin Islands, were suspended on Monday evening. Schools will remain closed on Wednesday but government offices are scheduled to reopen. Ms. Vázquez also signed an executive order freezing fuel prices to prevent gouging.
Power still goes out — if only briefly — on a regular basis in parts of Puerto Rico, where the electrical grid remains frail. Outages blamed on electrical storms were reported in several parts of the island on Tuesday afternoon. The public power utility is better prepared to respond to any possible outages than it was during Hurricane Maria in 2017, the governor said.
An average hurricane season, which lasts from June to November, has 12 named storms, a designation given to storms with winds that reach 39 miles per hour, said Mr. Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center. Of those, an average of six become hurricanes, with winds of at least 74 miles per hour, and three become a Category 3 or above, with winds over 111 miles per hour.
This year, 12 storms have been named, four have become hurricanes and one, Dorian, became a Category 5, wreaking catastrophic devastation in the Bahamas.
“We’re pretty close to an average season,” Mr. Feltgen said. “But we still have a little more than two months of the hurricane season to go.”
