If you’ve been keeping up with weather news you’ll know that there’s a major hurricane that’s formed in the Atlantic. A couple days ago meteorologists were still having difficulty predicting Hurricane Irma’s path, but now the storm seems to be figuring itself out and is on a path for the Caribbean, and potentially the south eastern coast of the US.
The south of Haiti is still recovering from Hurricane Matthew that blasted through last October. At this stage we’re still a few days out from seeing exactly where Irma will go. Predictions are that it’s going to continue heading west with a gradual veer north. This means it’ll sweep by the northern part of Haiti. Irma is currently rated as a Category 3 level hurricane, but they’re estimating that it’s going to pick up force overnight and build to a Category 4 sometime tonight.
What we’ve learned about storms like Irma and Haiti over the years, is that very few actually make landfall, but that doesn’t mean Haiti won’t see considerable damage. In 2004 it was Hurricane Jeanne, a storm that moved north of Haiti, that dumped so much rain on the island that Gonaives saw excessive flooding that wiped out half the city, and resulted in over 3000 deaths.
While we might not know exactly what to expect from Irma at this point as far as exact path and the force of winds, we do know that we’re going to be getting rain this week, and probably lots of it. It’s already very overcast with little systems moving over our little island.
We’ll be keeping an eye on Irma in the next few days and will be sure to update things here and on Facebook as there’s news to share.
~Leslie
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