“We are incommunicado and it continues to rain,” says Walfrido Rojas, a resident of the Dos Ríos municipality, in the province of Granma, as a summary of the situation in the area due to the heavy rain of the last days. The swelling of the Jiguaní and Contramaestre rivers has cut off the path to several towns where the floods have aggravated the lack of supplies.
Rojas, who has seen how his patio “has been under water for several days and we have lost what little we had left planted near the house,” he fears: “So there is no one to go out to look for food.” The man details via telephone to 14ymedio that “at least we had some cornmeal stored away, but in our neighborhood there are people who no longer have anything to eat.”
The inhabitants of the flooded area wait for the authorities to distribute food, but “so far they have not brought us anything.” “The heaviest downpour started last night and has continued all morning,” she details. The reports of the Provincial Meteorological Center put the rainfall in Manzanillo at 45 millimeters between 10:00 pm this Wednesday and 5:00 am this Thursday, while in Cabo Cruz they reach 32.6, in Veguitas 31, 2 and 12.8 mm in Jucarito.
But it has not all been bad news. After a long drought, Gennis Corrales Sánchez, director of water resources management at the Empresa de Aprovechamiento Hidráulico in the province, informed the Granma media that the water reservoirs reach 51% of their filling capacity.
“My family in Contramaestre called me saying that everything has been flooded and that they have been warned that there is a danger of landslides”
According to him, the reservoirs have more than 71 million cubic meters of water, “which guarantees the service of useful water and the supply for agricultural activity, as well as the reserve for 2024, according to the proximity of tropical systems.” .
The increase in the levels of accumulated water is also highlighted as a positive balance of the storm in Camagüey. Over there, reports Granma, the water has damaged 73 houses, ten of them, in “total collapses”.
In the municipality of the head, an elderly person was also injured when the roof of his house fell, in the historic center, while trying to repair the roof. His state of health, says the official newspaper, “is stable and without danger to life.”
In the province of Santiago de Cuba the situation is similar. “My family in Contramaestre called me saying that everything has been flooded and that they have been warned that there is a danger of landslides,” says Marcia, a resident of the Santiago capital and who this morning lost contact with her relatives.
“I have a cousin who lives in Maffo and the last thing she told me is that the Mije stream, which is close to their house, was totally overflowing.” In Tercer Frente the outlook is also alarming and the rain has damaged the electrical service in large areas of the municipality.
This Wednesday the Cuban Institute of Meteorology issued a special notice to explain that the cause of the heavy downpours is the combination of a trough in the middle and upper levels of the troposphere over the Gulf of Mexico, together with a humid flow from the south at low levels, to which is added the evening instability.
In eastern Cuba, 21 meteorological stations have registered accumulations greater than 100 millimeters and the current meteorological conditions are expected to continue for the next few days, in which there are great possibilities of showers, rains and electrical storms in much of Cuba. the island.
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