|
Home>News Center>World | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Hurricane Ivan pounds Eastern Caribbean island
Hurricane Ivan tore down trees, blew off roofs, knocked out power and forced hundreds of people to evacuate coastal areas as it pounded the tiny islands of the southeastern Caribbean on Tuesday.
Ivan, the latest storm in a busy Atlantic hurricane season, swept south of Barbados and over Grenada, brushing past Tobago as it headed into the Caribbean basin far south enough to prompt precautions on Venezuela's coast.
Ivan was a powerful storm with sustained winds of 120 mph, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Storm warnings for the ninth cyclone of the Atlantic hurricane season stretched from the French territory of Martinique in the north to Trinidad and Tobago in the south, and included Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Bonaire, Curacao, Aruba and Colombia's Guajira Peninsula.
In Barbados, a former British colony of 278,000, Ivan felled trees and power lines, hurled debris around and damaged some 176 homes and properties. It blew the roof off the landmark Atlantis hotel, built in 1884 on the seafront at St. Joseph, and damaged the roof of a new hanger near the airport housing a preserved Concorde jet.
"I'm feeling glad that it didn't hit us in full," said Shellie Welch of Christchurch in the south of Barbados, who sat out the storm at home with her two children. "I'm just imagining what if it did, because the houses here aren't built all that strong."
Schools and businesses closed in the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, which has a population of 1.1 million and is the Caribbean's top oil producer.
STORM HALTS GAS EXPORTS TO U.S.
Energy companies evacuated workers from offshore oil platforms and halted or cut production. Atlantic LNG stopped export shipments as the storm approached Trinidad, which is the largest liquefied natural gas supplier to the United States.
In Tobago, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, residents packed into shelters, fearing their houses might not withstand the heavy rain and winds.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves said the storm tore the roof off a hospital and damaged several houses on Union Island.
"The sea has come in and removed a couple of houses. Apparently there were waves of up to 20 feet high so that has been very terrible," Gonsalves told a Trinidad television station.
Ivan spun off squalls that battered Venezuela's coastline with heavy rains, strong winds and high waves. Officials in northeastern Sucre State and nearby Margarita Island moved residents away from risky coastal areas, restricted air and sea traffic and closed some airports and harbors, Civil Protection Service chief Antonio Rivero said.
"It's affecting us in an indirect way but with real strength because of its size," he said.
Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, said its crude shipments and production had not been affected so far.
At 5 p.m. EDT, Ivan was about 20 miles west-southwest of Grenada. It was moving rapidly west at about 18 mph and could strengthen over the next day as it moves through the Caribbean, the hurricane center said.
The hurricane center's long-range forecast, which has a large margin of error, put the storm over Jamaica on Friday and southwestern Cuba on Sunday.
Farther north in Florida, residents and authorities worried that Ivan could become the third hurricane to hit the state in a month, after Charley pummeled the southwest coast on Aug. 13 and Frances lumbered over the east coast on the weekend. But although Florida was a possible track for Ivan, it was too soon to tell where it would head. |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
