Most
people living near a crumbling dam in storm-battered Puerto Rico have
been moved to safety, Governor Ricardo Rossello said yesterday as he
urged the US Congress to fund an aid package to avert a humanitarian
crisis after Hurricane Maria.
Most of the Caribbean island, a US
territory with a population of 3.4mn, is still without electricity five
days after Maria swept ashore with ferocious winds and torrential rains,
the most powerful hurricane to hit Puerto Rico for nearly a century.
There
have been growing concerns for some 70,000 people who live in the river
valley below the Guajataca Dam in the island’s northwest, where cracks
were seen appearing on Friday in the 88-year-old earthen structure.
Rossello said he was working on the assumption that the dam would collapse.
“I’d
rather be wrong on that front than doing nothing and having that fail
and costing people lives,” he said in an interview with CNN. “Some of
the dam has fallen apart and now we’re making sure that we can assess if
the other part is going to fall down as well .... most of the people in
the near vicinity have evacuated.”
It was unclear if the governor
was saying that most of the 70,000 valley inhabitants had left the area,
or only the several hundred people living in the small towns closest to
the dam.
About 320 people from those towns have moved to safety, according to local media.
The
fear of a potentially catastrophic dam break added to the difficulties
facing disaster relief authorities after Maria, which was the second
major hurricane to strike Caribbean this month and which killed at least
29 people in the region.
At least 10 of those who died were in
Puerto Rico, including several people who drowned or were hit by flying
debris, and three elderly sisters who died in a mudslide.
Many structures on the island, including hospitals, remain badly damaged and flooded.
Clean drinking water is hard to find in some areas.
Very few planes have been able to land or take off from damaged airports.
After
Maria caused widespread flooding, the National Weather Service (NWS)
warned of further flash floods in some western parts of the island on
Monday as thunderstorms moved in.
The hurricane hit at a time when Puerto Rico was already battling economic crisis.
Rossello
said yesterday that before the storms struck he had been embarking on
an aggressive fiscal agenda that included more than $1.5bn in cuts.
“This
is a game changer,” the governor told CNN. “This is a completely
different set of circumstances. This needs to be taken into
consideration otherwise there will be a humanitarian crisis.”
In
Washington, US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said that
Congress was working with President Donald Trump’s administration to
make sure the necessary assistance reaches Puerto Rico.
“Our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico remain in our prayers as we make sure they have what they need,” Ryan said in a statement.
Maria
continued to weaken and would likely be downgraded from a hurricane to a
tropical storm by tonight, the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said.
As
of 11am ET (1500 GMT) yesterday, it was about 315 miles (505km)
south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, heading slowly north,
the NHC said.
The storm was unlikely to hit the continental US
directly, but a tropical storm warning was in effect for much of the
North Carolina coast.
Officials issued a mandatory evacuation order for visitors to Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks.
A man rides his bicycle through a damaged road in Toa Alta, west of San Juan, Puerto Rico following the passage of Hurricane Maria. Authorities in Puerto Rico are rushing to evacuate people living downriver from a dam said to be in danger of collapsing.