KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent (AP):
A TROPICAL depression that had threatened to become yet another named storm in an already record-breaking season dissipated yesterday over the southern Caribbean Sea following its damaging passage over the Windward Islands.
The depression is no longer expected to become a tropical storm, though its remnants could be absorbed by another system and pose a new threat in one to two days, said Jack Beven, a hurricane specialist with the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.
The depression's remnants were about 370 miles (595 kilometres) southwest of the Dominican Republic and about 305 miles (485 kilometres) southeast of Jamaica.
"It just sort of weakened and fizzled out," Beven said of the system, which forecasters had earlier warned could become the 24th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.
TWO DEAD
In the Windward Island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, authorities evaluated the damage from a day earlier, when the storm system's heavy rains caused rivers to overflow and sparked mudslides that killed two fishermen.
In the capital, Kingstown, where landslides destroyed three houses and rivers burst their banks, the rains stopped long enough for workers to clear fallen trees, mud and debris from the roads.
On the Grenadine island of Bequia, where a mudslide buried two men who were on a fishing trip, authorities relocated people whose homes were damaged or destroyed by floodwaters into temporary housing provided by the government, said Howie Prince, an emergency management coordinator.
Authorities also evaluated the damage in Trinidad and Tobago, where rain swept away two bridges outside of the capital, Port-of-Spain, before it moved off to the west and the open sea.
Several towns and villages along Trinidad's north coast were cut off from the rest of the country because major roads had been damaged from the heavy rain.
Yesterday, the road from Port-of-Spain to Toco, in northeast Trinidad, was covered with some two to three feet of water after the Matura River overflowed its banks.
Parts of eastern Trinidad were also flooded and authorities reported as many as 30 landslides in the area, but no fatalities.
