Sept. 24, 2002 – Look for thunderstorms and showers starting Tuesday afternoon as Tropical Storm Lili makes its way across the Caribbean.
"It looks like it's going to pass well south of the Virgin Islands," Miguel Sierra, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in San Juan, said Tuesday morning, and by mid-day that was what had occurred.
The 11 a.m. coordinates were 13.2 degrees north latitude and 65.6 degrees west longitude, which put the center of the storm slightly west and well south of the Virgin Islands.
Lili was moving west at nearly 16 mph with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph. Tropical storm-force winds extended outward 125 miles from the center, and the estimated minimum central barometric pressure stood at 29.65 inches.
Sierra said that as of 5 a.m., the storm's center was 320 miles south of St. Croix. However, he said, most of the showers associated with the storm were to the north and east of the center, putting them closer to the Virgin Islands. Sierra predicted that sustained winds would hit 20 to 25 mph in the territory, with higher gusts during thunderstorms. Flooding, particularly in low-lying areas, is possible, he said.
Clayton Sutton, deputy director on St. Thomas for the V.I. Territorial Emergency Management Agency, said people with homes or businesses in flood-prone areas should be prepared. He suggested they buy sandbags at a hardware store, fill them, and place them strategically to help keep rising water from coming into their property.
The storm system will continue to deliver rain and thunderstorms into Wednesday, with gradual clearing throughout the day, Sutton said.
Lili is expected to start turning toward the west-northwest later Tuesday, and its winds are expected to strengthen so that the storm could be upgraded to a hurricane, the National Weather Service reported. The system appears headed for Haiti and the eastern tip of Cuba.
While the Virgin Islands seems to have avoided the brunt of Tropical Storm Lili, Sutton noted that hurricane season still has a ways to go. It runs June 1 through Nov. 30, and the territory has in recent years seen hurricanes in both October and November.
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