Tropical storm Olga drenched the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in the early hours of Wednesday and later made its way towards Cuba, DPA reported. Some 1,000 families had to be evacuated in the Dominican Republic (which is on Hispaniola, like Haiti) due to the heavy rains. Some communities were isolated from the rest of the country, and meteorologists have noted that Haiti and Cuba were similarly threatened. By Wednesday morning Olga was again weakened, and experts expected that trend to continue. The centre of the storm had wind speeds of 70 kilometres an hour. In the Dominican town of Santiago there was severe flooding after the authorities ordered that large quantities of water be let off from a dam. Many homes were under water, and some were totally destroyed. One resident of the town was missing. Since week's begin, it has been raining heavily in the Dominican Republic - where over 100 people died in in late October, as a consequence of tropical storm Noel - and in Haiti. The rain can provoke dangerous floods and landslides, and large parts of the Dominican Republic are on alert. Cuban authorities were also alert as the storm approached. Olga started to develop Monday, two weeks after the end of the official hurricane season on the Caribbean.
