Hurricanes tend to go in a senw direction and most of the storms that reaches the island of Santo Domingo enter through the southeast or the Bahoruco peninsula. When ever a hurricane enters the DR anywhere between SD and LR it makes a beeline for the Central Mountains and those mountains are so high and big, that they literally break up the storms. By the time the storm exits the island on the Haitian side, it usually does as a tropical depression and then it reorganizes over the Atlantic and by the time it hits Florida, its a full fledge hurricane again. That's what happened with Georges in 1998. That was the strongest hurricane to hit the DR in recorded history. It entered near SPM as a category 4 or 5 and by the time it left the island via Haiti, it was nothing more than a bunch of clouds with plenty of lightning and rain.
. Not sure if this is true, but I have been told more than once that the interior mountain range has protected the north coast from hurricanes in the past that have come up the gulf coast, east of Hispaniola.
