Government crews in Cuba were working to restore power Tuesday night after Hurricane Ian cut off the entire island, officials said.
At least two people died as a result of the cyclone, which tore through western Cuba on Tuesday as a Category 3 hurricane en route to Florida, officials said. Buildings and infrastructure in the western province of Pinar del Rio, where Ian made landfall earlier in the day, suffered extensive damage.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said the region experienced “significant wind and storm surge impacts,” with sustained winds of 125 mph.
Ian’s forecast: Category 4 expected to make landfall along Florida’s west coast Wednesday
Authorities initially reported 1 million people without power. Later Tuesday, they said the entire island of 11 million was out.
“The SEN has an exceptional condition, 0 electricity generation (the country without electricity service), associated with the complex weather system,” tweeted the Ministry of Energy and Mines at 8:42 p.m., using the Spanish acronym for the national electricity grid .
The Cuban Electric Union said crews will work through the night to restore power. Faults appeared on the western, central and eastern links.
“It’s a process that will take some time,” union chief Lázaro Guerra Hernández told state television.
Yamilé Ramos Cordero, president of the Provincial Defense Council of Pinar del Río, confirmed at least two deaths from the collapse of buildings. A woman in the municipality of Pinar del Río de San Luis died when a wall collapsed in her home, he said. A man from another municipality died when a roof collapsed.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel visited Pinar del Río after the storm passed. “The damage is great, although it has not yet been accounted for,” he tweeted. “Help is already coming in from all over the country.”
We were in #PinarDelRío. The damage is great, although it has not yet been possible to account for it. Help is already pouring in from all over the country. We trust the Pinarenys, a noble, hard-working people with a lot of experience in these situations. Rest assured that we will recover. pic.twitter.com/zg5VNKA9sN
— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) September 27, 2022
Eleazar Moreno Ricardo, network director of the electrical union, told the Communist Party newspaper Granma that brigades from across the island began moving to the western provinces to begin restoring power as soon as the weather allowed. .
“The work to assess the damage has already begun, and in some areas of the Island of Youth, the first territory that felt the force of the hurricane, it has already been possible to restore the electricity service”, he reported Granma shortly after 9 p.m.
Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth, is about 30 miles from the Cuban mainland.
“The most complex situation is in Pinar del Río, where all the transmission networks are out of service, and there is a lot of damage to transformers and secondary networks,” Granma reported.
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CNN Havana bureau chief Patrick Oppmann tweeted a video of himself driving along the Malecón, Havana’s famous waterfront esplanade, now flooded. Some lights were visible in the distance.
Before Ian made landfall, officials in Pinar del Rio set up 55 shelters, evacuated 50,000 people and took measures to protect crops in the country’s main tobacco-growing region.
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Cuba has long experience preparing for hurricanes, but it also suffers from food and electricity shortages. The economy has been hampered in part by the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic and in part by new US sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and partially maintained by the Biden administration.