CBS News
Saturday Sessions: Aaron Frazer performs “Easy To Love”
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami says Hurricane Oscar has formed off the coast of the Bahamas.
Oscar, which the hurricane center characterized as “tiny,” formed Saturday. Oscar – the 15th named storm of the hurricane season – formed as a tropical storm just east of the Turks and Caicos islands, before quickly becoming a hurricane.
The government of the Bahamas has issued a hurricane warning for the Turks and Caicos Islands and the southeastern Bahamas. The government of Cuba has issued a hurricane watch for the provinces of Guantanamo, Holguin, and Las Tunas.
Turks and Caicos and southeastern Bahamas can expect heavy rainfall later tonight and tomorrow, the hurricane center said. Rains are expected to spread to eastern Cuba on Sunday.
National Hurricane Center
The storm’s maximum sustained winds were clocked at 80 mph with higher gusts. Its center was located about 165 miles east-southeast of the southeastern Bahamas and about 470 miles east of Camaguey, Cuba.
Tropical Storm Nadine formed hours earlier in the western Caribbean and is moving westward toward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. It made landfall near Belize City in Belize around 12 p.m. Eastern.
Heavy rain and tropical storm conditions were occurring over parts of Belize and the Yucatan peninsula.
A tropical storm warning is in effect for Belize City and from Belize to Cancun, Mexico, including Cozumel.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1 and finishes Nov. 30, with most activity occurring between mid-August and mid-October. Hurricane activity tends to peak in mid-September, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Florida, Gulf Coast communities are struggling in the wake of back-to-back hurricanes, as Hurricane Helene rammed into the region less than two weeks before Hurricane Milton arrived.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Cuba’s government on Saturday said that some electricity was restored on the island after one of the country’s major power plants failed and left millions without electricity in an outage that started two days earlier.
Energy minister Vicente de la O Levy said the country had 500 megawatts of energy in its electrical grid early Saturday. He posted on X that “several substations in the west now have electricity.”
O Levy also said two thermoelectric power plants are back and two more will resume their operations “in the next few hours.”
In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose failure on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others and it wasn’t immediately clear whether or not they remained functional.
There is no official estimate for when the blackout will be ended. Even in a country that is used to outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving intense hurricanes, like one in 2022.
The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling nonessential services. Officials said that 1.64 gigawatts went offline during peak hours, about half the total demand at the time.
Local authorities said the outage, which started in a smaller scale on Thursday, stemmed from increased demand from small and medium-sized companies and residences’ air conditioners. Later, the blackout got worse due to breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities.
Changes to electricity rates for small- and medium-sized companies, which have proliferated since they were first authorized by the communist government in 2021, are also being considered.
