The potential calamity was unfolding even as Puerto Ricans struggled without electricity to clean up and dig out from devastation left days earlier by Maria, which has killed at least 25 people across the Caribbean, according to officials and media reports.
Some 70,000 people live in a cluster of communities under evacuation downstream from the earthen dam on the rain-swollen Guajataca River, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello said in a late-afternoon news conference on Friday.
Residents of the area were being ferried to higher ground in buses, according to bulletins issued by the National Weather Service from its office in San Juan, the capital of the U.S. island territory.
Christina Villalba, an official for the island’s emergency management agency, said there was little doubt the dam was about to break.
“It could be tonight, it could be tomorrow, it could be in the next few days, but it’s very likely it will be soon,” she told Reuters by telephone on Friday night. She said authorities aimed to complete evacuations within hours.
Governor Ricardo Rossello went to the municipality of Isabela on Friday night and told mayor Carlos Delgado that an evacuation there was urgent, his office said in a statement.
Rossello said the rains sparked by Maria had cracked the dam and could cause fatal flooding.
Puerto Rico’s national guard had been mobilized to help the police evacuate all necessary areas, Rossello said.
People had begun leaving nearby areas, but one small community was refusing and Rossello instructed the police to step in under a law that mandated them to remove the local population in an emergency, the statement said.
Read more at Failing Dam Poses New Crisis on Puerto Rico Amid Flooding from Hurricane Maria
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