Tropical Storm Drenches Cuba, Heads for Bahamas
Date: 31-Oct-07
Country: CUBA
Torrential rains drenched eastern Cuba, where double the average rainfall in October had reservoirs already filled to the brim and authorities worried about flooding. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages.
"There's lots of rain, but no really strong winds like a hurricane," said Chantal Rivas, owner of a bed and breakfast in the port of Gibara, 470 miles (750 km) east of Havana.
The storm knocked down trees on the coast of neighboring Camaguey, a beach resort hotel receptionist said, as it swept along Cuba's north coast and curled north toward the Bahamas,
By 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), the center of the storm was l35 miles (60 km) west-northwest of Holguin, Cuba, and its maximum sustained winds had dropped to 50 miles per hour (85 kph), the US National Hurricane Center said.
Computer models showed Noel heading northwest toward Florida but making a sharp turn at some point to the northeast and swirling out over the Bahamas into the Atlantic.
The 14th named storm of the 2007 Atlantic storm season was not expected to strengthen significantly because of unfavorable wind conditions in the atmosphere. But the hurricane center forecast Noel would briefly become a minimal hurricane on its closest approach to southeast Florida.
The Miami-based center's official forecast took Noel's top sustained winds up to a peak of 75 mph (120 kph), just over the cusp of qualifying as a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
Noel killed more than a dozen people on Monday after dumping torrential rain on the Dominican Republic and the treeless hillsides of neighboring Haiti, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.
The toll, which includes at least one person killed in Haiti, was expected to climb because of reports of several other deaths and more than a dozen missing.