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Hurricane Maria has cut power to the entire island of Puerto Rico, as the death toll from the powerful Category 4 storm climbed to nine in the Caribbean, officials said Wednesday.

Authorities said it’ll be months before Puerto Rico, which is home to more than 3.4 million people, regains electricity.

“We’re looking at four to six months without electricity,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told MSNBC.

Puerto Rico’s emergency management director Abner Gomez said Maria “has destroyed everything it has had in its path.”

“Definitely Puerto Rico — when we can leave — we will find our island destroyed,” Gomez said at a press conference, according to El Nuevo Día.

Meanwhile, seven people were reported dead on the island of Dominica, which suffered a “tremendous loss of housing and public buildings” when Maria made landfall there late Monday as a Category 5 storm, according to Hartley Henry, an adviser to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit.


Two others were killed on the French island of Guadeloupe.

Aerial footage shows devastating damage to Dominica, which has a population of nearly 74,000.

“Many buildings serving as shelters lost roofs, which means that a very urgent need now is tarpaulins and other roofing materials,” Henry wrote on Facebook. “Little contact has been made with the outer communities but persons who walked 10 and 15 miles towards the city of Roseau from various outer districts report total destruction of homes, some roadways and crops.”

Hurricane Maria is pictured over Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea.REUTERSHurricane Maria is pictured over Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea.REUTERS

With Post wires

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