SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Subtropical Storm Olga knocked out power and caused widespread flooding in Puerto Rico Tuesday and threatened the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with torrential downpours and mudslides.
Olga was a relatively weak storm with top sustained winds of 45 mph and forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted strong winds in the upper atmosphere would start to tug it apart Wednesday.
They said Olga's greatest threat was its torrential rains.
"These rains have already produced life-threatening flash floods and mudslides in Puerto Rico," the forecasters said in an advisory.
Tropical storm warnings and watches were issued for parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, and for the Turks and Caicos islands and the southeastern Bahamas.
At 1 p.m. EST, the storm's center was at the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic about 85 miles east of the capital of Santo Domingo.
Olga was moving west-northwest at near 10 mph and was expected to turn more to the west as it moved over Hispaniola, dumping up to 10 inches of rain on the island.
Authorities prepared to evacuate scores of families in vulnerable areas of the Dominican Republic, where at least 89 people were killed in devastating floods caused by Tropical Storm Noel in late October.
Olga pounded Puerto Rico with rain Monday night. Central mountain towns like Orocovis and Jayuya had received 8 inches of rain by midday Tuesday and it was still raining, the National Weather Service said.
The storm knocked out electric power to 80,000 customers, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said. The Aqueduct and Sewer Authority said 144,000 clients were without water because the storm disabled 11 of 33 electric-powered filtration plants.
Children were evacuated from an elementary school in Aguada, on the west coast, after the Culebrinas River flooded, the State Emergency Management Agency reported. Six other rivers flooded and a dozen major roadways were closed due to flooding and fallen trees, the agency said.
Most forecasting models showed the storm moving westward across the Caribbean toward Central America for the rest of the week, keeping it well away from U.S. oil and gas production facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.
One model had it crossing western Cuba into the southern Gulf of Mexico and then veering across the southern tip of Florida toward the Atlantic Ocean.
Olga, a subtropical storm with a cooler core than a tropical storm or hurricane, formed over the Virgin Islands on Monday, 10 days after the official end of the six-month Atlantic-Caribbean hurricane season.
Tropical storms draw strength from warm seas, so December storms are unusual. Olga was the 17th named storm to form in the region in the month of December since record-keeping began in 1851, the hurricane center forecasters said.
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