Hurricane Tomas

Pre-Landfall 3 | Summary
Posting Date: November 8, 2010, 8:15:00 AM

Last Friday morning, after re-intensifying to a Category 1 hurricane as it approached the narrow Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, Tomas veered slightly to the west and just missed making landfall on Haiti’s southern peninsula. Even so, the storm brought substantial precipitation to locations near Port-au-Prince. The storm also brought hurricane-force winds to westernmost Haiti, causing some wind damage to properties and crops. In advance of Tomas’ arrival, officials had worried that the more than 1 million people living in refugee camps in Port-au-Prince following Haiti’s earthquake in January would see their tent shelters destroyed. But today, officials report that the canvas and tarpaulin shelters held up well. Most tents are intact. Still, floodwater was ankle-deep in Port-au-Prince and garbage floats through the streets. To the south, the town of Leogane is completely inundated. Officials in Haiti worry that the flooding could worsen the country’s cholera epidemic. They believe the Artibonite River to be the prime source of this epidemic. On Saturday, this river was flooding after the heavy rains dumped by Tomas caused it to swell. Farther east, in the Dominican Republic, Tomas’s heavy rain isolated 39 communities and caused more than 12,000 people to flee their homes. After passing between Cuba and Haiti Friday, Tomas weakened somewhat unexpectedly. While the wind shear at the time was still relatively low, the circulation of the storm was disrupted by a large trough over the Eastern United States. Tomas hit the Turks and Caicos Islands as a tropical storm late Friday night, with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph at its nearest approach. The storm brought only light showers to the islands, flooding small sections of the main Leeward Highway in Providenciales, but causing little damage elsewhere. After passing the islands, Tomas re-intensified to a hurricane over the open Atlantic, before transitioning into a fully extratropical storm, having become absorbed in a large frontal system. The last National Hurricane Center advisory on Tomas was posted at 5:00 pm last night, November 7. Last Thursday, November 4, St. Lucia’s Prime Minister Stephenson King announced that damage caused by Tomas on the island of St. Lucia on October 30 would be US $185 million—five times higher than estimates had predicted earlier. Tomas, which brought sustained winds between 90 and 95 miles per hour to the island, is the second most costly storm to strike St. Lucia, after Hurricane Dean in 2007, since accurate recordkeeping began in 1851.

Pre-Landfall 3 | Downloads
Posting Date: November 8, 2010, 8:15:00 AM