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Alejandro Granadillo
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AP
A man stands in front of a beach in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday. Fiona became a hurricane over the weekend as it approaches the island.
Updated September 18, 2022 at 3:15 PM ET
The entire island of Puerto Rico was without power on Sunday afternoon as a rapidly intensifying hurricane neared. The Category 1 hurricane known as Fiona is poised to produce dangerous landslides and heavy flooding in an already storm-battered island.
As of Sunday afternoon, the storm was centered 25 miles southwest of Ponce, a city on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, according to the National Hurricane Center. It had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and was moving west-northwest at 8 mph.
Fiona is expected to trigger 12 to 16 inches of rainfall in Puerto Rico but up to 25 inches across the island’s eastern and southern regions.
More than 1,400,000 customers have lost electricity due to a transmission grid failure from the current hurricane, according to utility companies’ reports tracked by PowerOutage.US.
Governor Pedro Pierlusi wrote on Facebook that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority and Luma Energy responders “are active and ready to respond to the situation once conditions allow.”
This story will be updated.
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