Former Tropical Storm Julia turned into a hurricane on Saturday as it swirled toward Central America, where it was expected to make landfall along Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, weather forecasters said.
In Bluefields, one of Nicaragua’s key coastal towns expected to be hit by the storm, fishermen were busy securing their boats and people rushed to buy groceries and withdraw money from ATMs.
“Julia has evolved into a hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75 miles per hour (120 kilometers per hour) as it passes San Andres and Providencia Islands,” the US National Hurricane Center said.
Julia is classified as a Category 1 storm on the low side of the five-tier Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale.
It is expected to land in Nicaragua overnight and then move across the country on Sunday before traveling near or along the Pacific coasts of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala by Monday, the NHC said.
If Julia stays on its current course, it will make landfall as a Category 1 hurricane between the coastal communities of Orinoco and Laguna de Perlas north of Bluefields, Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo said, citing official reports.
Nicaragua has evacuated around 6,000 people in the Laguna de Perlas area, the offshore Miskito Keys and other zones.
“We have to prepare with food, plastic, a little bit of everything because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Javier Duarte, a carpenter at Bluefields, told AFP.
The municipality with around 60,000 inhabitants has many weak structures.
The NHC said “life-threatening flash floods and mudslides” are possible due to heavy rains “over Central America and southern Mexico by early next week.”
The center of the storm was about 20 miles southwest of the Colombian island of San Andres and about 125 miles northeast of Bluefields as of 00:00 GMT Sunday, the NHC said.
Julia will hit Central America less than two weeks after deadly Hurricane Ian struck southwest Florida in one of the deadliest US hurricanes on record.
The Category 4 storm leveled entire neighborhoods on the West Coast of the Sunshine State. More than 100 people were killed, according to US media.
