Fiona, September 18, 2022

Fiona became a hurricane around 1200 UTC on September 18, 2022, and made landfall over the southwest tip of Puerto Rico at about 1920 UTC, near Punta Tocón between Lajas and Cabo Rojo. The Tropical Cyclone Report gives peak sustained winds of about 75 knots — 85 miles per hour — and a minimum pressure near 986 millibars. Category One. The NHC update at the time of landfall agrees with those winds and that pressure.

AL072022: landfall near Punta Tocón, 1920 UTC, about 75 knots. The San Juan local summary is the rain companion.

The hazard was the water. Southerly flow against the Cordillera wrung out extreme rain over the south and east. NWS San Juan's Fiona page describes totals above 16 inches along the mountains, with local amounts reported above two feet around Cayey, Caguas, Aibonito, and southern Jayuya. Rivers already running high after earlier rain overflowed. Landslides cut roads María had already taught people to distrust.

The island-wide blackout was not a Category Four story. It was a grid story. A slow Category One with a thick rain shield can take down the same PREPA and LUMA system María had broken and reconstruction had not finished. Fiona's TCR is not an energy paper. It is honest about landfall intensity. Honesty about intensity is what keeps this storm from being inflated into a second María in the wind column.

Fiona then crossed the Mona Channel and struck the Dominican Republic, later became a major hurricane, and, as a post-tropical cyclone, set a Canadian record for central pressure. Puerto Rico's chapter is the southwest strike and the rain. The south coast crop loss belongs with agriculture. Death attribution belongs to public-health advisories, not a millibar contest.

Do not paste María's three death layers onto Fiona. Different storm, different method, different year.

Five years almost to the day from Yabucoa, the southwest took the eye and the mountains took the rain. That geography is the Cordillera acting as a climate wall, the subject of its own essay. Here the only required numbers are the TCR's: September 18, Punta Tocón, 85 miles per hour, 986 millibars.

Sources: NHC Tropical Cyclone Report, Hurricane Fiona (AL072022). Freeze 2026-08-22.