Patricia Mazzei and Amy Harmon

With up to 30,000 survivors of Hurricane Maria still living under leaky tarps, authorities were on alert, warning that the destructive potential of Karen should not be underestimated, even at relatively lower wind speeds of about 45 mph.

“Weather conditions are going to worsen,” Gov. Wanda Vázquez cautioned as she urged Puerto Ricans to get off the roads and out of rough seas and rising rivers. Employers, she said, should let workers stay home.

Puerto Ricans’ nerves had been jangled by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rattled the island Monday night. The quake hit at 11:23 p.m. local time, striking 49 miles off the northwest coast, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and was followed by a series of smaller aftershocks.

Elmer Román, Puerto Rico’s secretary of public safety, said there were no reports of injuries or any significant damage. Local news outlets reported a water pipe broke in Mayagüez, in western Puerto Rico.

Attention soon returned to Karen, a storm that bears little resemblance to Maria, which devastated the island two years ago when it was nearly a Category 5 hurricane, with winds of 155 mph. Hurricane Dorian, this season’s only major storm so far, mostly spared the island.

Karen’s storm clouds were forecast to cover most of Puerto Rico. Eighty-two emergency shelters opened in some vulnerable communities.

The combination of Karen and the lingering effects of Hurricane Maria was already posing logistical problems.

The Puerto Rican island municipality of Vieques has been without a fully functioning hospital since Maria destroyed its public medical facility in 2017. So when a newborn on Vieques got sick Tuesday morning, the Puerto Rico National Guard had to be called on to fly the baby in a helicopter to a hospital on the big island.

A 15-year-old girl also had to be medevaced from Vieques on Monday night, said Rafael Rodríguez Mercado, the health secretary.

“People are saying, ‘It’s just a tropical storm,’ but there’s no such thing as ‘just a tropical storm,’ ” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “Tropical storms can create a lot of havoc.”

In Puerto Rico, mayors said they heeded emergency managers’ calls to clear storm drains to prepare for rain and prevent flash flooding. Several times Tuesday afternoon, flood warnings issued by the National Weather Service flashed in red on local television.

The core of Tropical Storm Karen approached southeastern Puerto Rico late Tuesday afternoon, but the worst rains would come afterward, on the back side of the storm. Isolated areas, especially in Puerto Rico’s central mountainous region, could get up to 10 inches of rain. Those conditions could create life-threatening mudslides, meteorologists warned.

“Puerto Rico is prepared,” Vázquez insisted.

Ferries to Vieques and Culebra, which are between the big island and the U.S. Virgin Islands, were suspended Monday evening. Schools and government offices remained closed Tuesday. Vázquez signed an executive order freezing fuel prices to prevent gouging.

Power still goes out — if only briefly — on a regular basis in parts of Puerto Rico, where the electrical grid remains frail. Outages blamed on lightning storms were reported in several parts of the island Tuesday afternoon. The public power utility is better prepared to respond to any possible outages than it was during Hurricane Maria in 2017, the governor said.

An average hurricane season, which lasts from June to November, has 12 named storms, a designation given to storms with winds that reach 39 mph, said Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center. Of those, an average of six become hurricanes, with winds of at least 74 mph, and three become a Category 3 or above, with winds more than 111 mph.

This year, 12 storms have been named, four have become hurricanes and one, Dorian, became a Category 5, wreaking catastrophic devastation in the Bahamas.

“We’re pretty close to an average season,” Feltgen said. “But we still have a little more than two months of the hurricane season to go.”

This article originally appeared in

Tropical Storm Karen's Rains Begin to Soak Puerto Rico

Tropical Storm Karen began to drench Puerto Rico on Tuesday with heavy rain that is forecast to continue Wednesday and could cause flash flooding and mudslides.

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Patricia Mazzei and Amy Harmon

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Tropical Storm Karen's Rains Begin to Soak Puerto Rico