Hurricane Matthew, the most powerful Atlantic tropical storm in almost a decade, was gearing up to deliver a potentially devastating blow to the Caribbean as wary U.S. authorities began preparing for a possible landfall on the Atlantic Coast late in the week.
Well before its expected arrival sometime early Tuesday, Matthew was already pouring torrential rain on Haiti, where "staggering rainfall totals are possible," said Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center.
National and international authorities were rushing to meet what was being predicted as a humanitarian disaster in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, which is still struggling to rebound from a series of earlier natural disasters.
At 11 p.m. ET Monday, Matthew was a category 4 hurricane, making it the most powerful Atlantic storm since 2007. It was 190 miles southwest of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and was creeping along at just 7 mph with slightly stronger sustained winds up to 145 mph.
rojections of the potential disaster in Haiti were so dire that the U.S. Embassy in Port-Au-Prince felt compelled to reassure people that as far as it knew, there was nothing yet that "indicates that southern cities will 'disappear.'"
Matthew is "just an absolute powerhouse," said Ari Sarsalari, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel. And besides Haiti, it will be "a really nasty storm in Jamaica and eastern Cuba," he said.
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