The deaths were reported in the Dominican Republic and St. Lucia as the storm, previously the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, slammed the western Caribbean on Sunday.
Tropical Storm Elsa, which battered islands in the eastern Caribbean as the first hurricane of the 2021 Atlantic season, was blamed for the deaths of at least three people in St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic as it barreled toward Cuba on Sunday afternoon. The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency reported one death on Saturday in Soufrière, St. Lucia. And in the Dominican Republic, a 15-year-old and a 75-year-old woman died in separate incidents on Saturday when walls collapsed on them in heavy rain, the country’s Emergency Operations Center said in a statement. As of 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, the center of the fast-moving storm, which had sustained winds of 60 miles per hour, was approaching eastern Cuba, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm was moving northwest at 14 m.p.h. “While it’s slowing down, it’s going to be moving over the southwest peninsula of Haiti, then near Jamaica, and then it’s going to go over western and central Cuba,” said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The storm was expected to weaken over Cuba on Monday, the center said. A hurricane watch, in which hurricane conditions are possible but are not expected, was in effect for various Cuban provinces. The storm moved across the eastern Caribbean Sea on Friday evening and to an area near Hispaniola late Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the storm was moving toward the eastern provinces of Cuba, and was expected to move toward the island’s central and western provinces on Monday.
