Hurricane Matthew lands in Haiti

Hurricane Matthew roared into the southwestern coast of Haiti on Tuesday as it headed north toward Cuba and the eastern coast of Florida. The dangerous Category 4 storm made landfall around dawn on Haiti’s southern peninsula, where many people live along the coast in shacks of wood and corrugated steel that stand little chance of withstanding the force of the system’s maximum sustained winds of 145 mph (230 kph). Matthew was also expected to bring 15-25 inches of rain, along with up to 10 feet (3 meters) of storm surge and battering waves, said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. “They are getting everything a major hurricane can throw at them,” Feltgen said.
The storm was moving along the Windward Passage between Haiti and Jamaica, headed for southeastern Cuba and then into the Bahamas. The hurricane center said it would likely issue a tropical storm watch or hurricane watch for the Florida Keys or the Florida peninsula and that it could create dangerous beach conditions along the East Coast later in the week.
As dawn broke, people in the south coast tourist town of Port Salut described howling winds and big waves slamming the beaches and washing over the coastal road. Haiti’s civil protection agency reported one death, a fisherman who drowned in rough water churned up by the storm. That raised Matthew’s death toll to at least three. One man died in Colombia and a teen was killed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines as the storm moved through the Caribbean.

Source: TIME