© Ricardo Rojas / Reuters
A member of the Emergency Operations Committee (COE) monitors the trajectory of Hurricane Irma in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, September 6, 2017.
A member of the Emergency Operations Committee (COE) monitors the trajectory of Hurricane Irma in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, September 6, 2017.
Conflicting reports emerged in the vacuum of information and the absence of direct communication with the island. Some claimed that 1,000 people had died but this was quickly debunked, with calls for people to wait for official confirmation before retweeting carelessly and generating unnecessary panic and dismay.
The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, has confirmed one fatality after making a roundtrip to the island on a helicopter.
"There has been a fatality. An infant died as a result of their mother trying to escape a damaged property. We are not too sure of the cause of death," Browne told local ABS news in an interview.
Browne said the scenes he witnessed on the island were "heart-wrenching."
"If I was a crying man, I would have cried," Browne told ABS. "[It was] one of the worst feelings I have ever felt in my entire life... Absolute devastation, this is no hyperbole."
Comment: While climate scientists are now saying Harvey "should serve as a warning", they are not considering the importance of atmospheric dust loading and the winning Electric Universe model in their research. Such information and much more, are explained in the book Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. Increasing cometary and volcanic dust loading of the atmosphere (one indicator is the intensification of noctilucent clouds we are witnessing) is accentuating electric charge build-up, whereby we can expect to observe more extreme weather and planetary upheaval as well as awesome light shows and other related mysterious phenomena.
See also: Study: Tornado outbreaks are increasing - but scientists don't understand why. A coauthor of this paper states "What's pushing this rise in extreme outbreaks is far from obvious in the present state of climate science."