Cuba’s electricity grid has collapsed, leaving the entire country without power in the wake of Hurricane Ian, as residents in Florida braced for the arrival of what is expected to be a catastrophic Category 4 storm.
The western end of Cuba was hit by violent winds and flooding on Tuesday, affecting infrastructure, state-run media reported, while some of the country’s most important tobacco farms were devastated.
Cuba’s National Electricity Union said that power would be restored gradually on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
Lázaro Guerra Hernandez, from the Electric Union of Cuba, said people were working through the night and that power would be gradually restored. He called it “an exceptional condition – a total of zero” electricity generation. “We are starting the process of restoring the system. It’s a process that takes time, it must be done with precision,” he said.
The island’s decades-old electrical grid has been faltering for months, with blackouts common, but officials said the storm had proven too much, provoking a failure that shut off the lights for its 11.3 million people.
The country’s key Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant “could not be synchronised”, a journalist with a state-run news agency was reported as saying, leaving no electricity generation on the island.
Earlier, the hurricane tore through the west of the country on Tuesday morning, making landfall in Pinar del Río province, where officials set up 55 shelters, evacuated 50,000 people and took steps to protect crops in the nation’s main tobacco-growing region. The storm left at least two dead in western Cuba, state-run media reported.
Violent wind gusts shattered windows and ripped metal roofs off homes and buildings throughout Pinar del Río. Roads into the areas directly hit by the hurricane remained impassable, blocked by downed trees and powerlines.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ana Julia Gomez, a 56-year-old woman, as she surveyed the wreckage inside her Pinar del Río home. “I lost everything – nothing is left.”
The hurricane hit Cuba at a time of dire economic crisis. Blackouts and long-running shortages of food, medicine and fuel are likely to complicate efforts to recover from the storm. “Ian has done away with what little we had left,” said Omar Avila, a worker at butcher shop in Pinar del Rio. “It’s a horrible disaster.”
Many buildings on tobacco farms buildings had been flattened by the storm, state-run media said. Farmer Abel Hernandez, 49, said: “It destroyed our houses, our drying huts, our farms, the fruit trees, everything.”
Businesses in Florida, meanwhile, were shuttering and officials ordered 2.5 million people to evacuate before it crashes ashore Wednesday.