Tropical storm Elsa forces the evacuation of more than 200,000 people in Cuba

Tropical Storm Elsa, the fifth of the current Atlantic hurricane season, hit central and western Cuba on Monday with heavy rains and sustained winds of up to 100 kilometers per hour en route to Florida.

Since Sunday, its influence has been felt in the eastern territory of Cuba, causing the evacuation of more than 200,000 people on the island and numerous damage to crops and coastal areas, but without causing deaths.

The arrival of Elsa occurred in the middle of the worst coronavirus outbreak on the island, after five days of breaking records of infected, with figures exceeding 3,000 cases a day, a situation that maintains hospitals and isolation centers in a state of great tension.

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Precisely, many of these isolation centers enabled to combat the epidemic are the places where the authorities usually house people living in low-lying areas and at risk of flooding, so on this occasion many were asked to evacuate to the home of friends or family as long as the storm passes.

Another additional problem is the serious shortage that affects Cuba at the moment, which forces people to queue in stores to get basic necessities and makes it impossible to accumulate food at home.

Elsa was the first hurricane of this cyclonic season, although upon entering Cuba through the southern coast of Matanzas, at 2 p.m. on Monday (local time), through the Ciénaga de Zapata area, it had lost intensity and its category it was a tropical storm. In any case, the large areas of rain associated with this meteorological phenomenon were causing flooding and overflowing rivers. Several towns in the center of the country were cut off by heavy rainfall, especially in the mountainous areas of the Sierra del Escambray.

Elsa was supposed to leave Cuba on Monday night along the north coast, near Havana, heading for the Florida Keys. In Miami Dade County, Elsa forced the demolition of the structure of a 12-story building partially collapsed on June 24 in the Surfside area on Sunday. The unstable remains of the standing block of Champlain Towers South, where 25 people were killed and more than 100 people are missing, posed a threat to search and rescue teams still at the scene.

Elsa formed off the coast of the Barbados islands last Wednesday and reached hurricane status over the weekend as it passed through the southern Caribbean islands, becoming the first phenomenon of the season of its kind. Upon arrival in the Dominican Republic, a 15-year-old boy died in the Bahoruco region from a wall fall and a 75-year-old woman died when her house in Bani collapsed, as reported by the National Institute of Legal Medicine (Inacif). The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) reported a third victim in Soufriere. The rest of the region has reported urban and agricultural damage with no further fatalities.

The 2020 season closed last November being the most active on record in the 21st century.

The number of storms and hurricanes identified exhausted the names of the previous list of the authorities, who had to resort to the Greek alphabet.

This year the season is expected to be just as active, thanks to the action of climate change and warming of the ocean surface.

The acceleration of the process between La Niña and El Niño will produce more phenomena in the Atlantic.

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