One of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit Puerto Rico pummeled the island Wednesday Sep 20,2017as officials warned it would decimate the power company's crumbling infrastructure and force the government to rebuild dozens of communities.
Maria made landfall early Wednesday in the southeast coastal town of Yabucoa as a Category 4 storm, and it was expected to punish the island with life-threatening 155 mph winds for 12 to 24 hours, forecasters said.
Maria had previously been a Category 5 storm with 175 mph winds, but was downgraded as it slashed its way through the U.S. Virgin Islands overnight.
'This is going to be an extremely violent phenomenon,' Puerto Rico's Gov. Ricardo Rossello said in advance of the storm. 'We have not experienced an event of this magnitude in our modern history.'
The storm was moving across Puerto Rico on Wednesday morning at 10 mph, with a gust of 113 mph reported in the capital of San Juan, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Maria ties for the eighth strongest storm in Atlantic history, when measured by wind speed. Coming in second is this year's Irma, which had 185 mph winds and killed 38 people in the Caribbean and another 36 in the U.S. earlier this month.
Puerto Rico had long been spared from a direct hit by hurricanes that tend to veer north or south of the island. The last Category 4 hurricane landfall in Puerto Rico occurred in 1932, and the strongest storm to ever hit the island was San Felipe in 1928 with winds of 160 mph.
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