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Jamaicans flee as Ivan approaches; 32 dead
Hurricane Ivan's deadly winds and monstrous waves bore down on Jamaica on Friday, threatening a direct hit on its densely populated capital after ravaging Grenada and killing at least 32 people.
The Jamaican government ordered half a million people from coastal areas, where rains on Ivan's outer edges were already flooding roads.
In its wake, Ivan left Grenada a wasteland of flattened houses, twisted metal and splintered wood and sparked a frenzy of looting. Authorities found nine more dead in Grenada — including two foreign yachters — raising Ivan's death toll across the region to 32.
U.S. officials ordered people to evacuate from the Florida Keys after forecasters said the storm — the fourth major hurricane of the Atlantic season — could hit the island chain by Sunday after passing the Cayman Islands and crossing Cuba. It was the third evacuation in Florida in a month, following Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Frances.
The storm's current path would take it directly over Kingston, Jamaica's sprawling capital of 1 million people in the southeast, and smash across the island to exit around Montego Bay in the northwest.
Friday morning, the storm's leading edge was kicking up heavy rain and winds off Jamaica's eastern tip and as far away as Montego Bay, where stranded tourists crowded the airport and armed private guards began patrolling against looters.
Driving rains in Montego Bay flooded roads with up to a foot of water. A large storm surge also flooded roads in eastern Jamaica.
The onslaught was expected to impede the evacuation — of one in five Jamaicans, some of whom are refusing to abandon their homes, Power 106 radio reported.
In nearby Haiti on Friday, the storm's leading edge forced piles of sand and water up to knee-high into seaside neighborhoods of Les Cayes, a city of 300,000 on the southwest pensinsula. Hundreds of residents sheltered in schools and churches.
Cuba declared a hurricane watch across the entire island Friday, after its leader, Fidel Castro, went on national television the night before warning residents to brace themselves. "Whatever the hurricane does, we will all work together" to rebuild, he said.
At 11 am EDT, Ivan's eye was about 155 miles southeast of Kingston, Jamaica, and was moving west-northwest at 12 mph. Hurricane-force winds extended 60 miles, while tropical storm-force winds stretched 175 miles.
In Grenada, an island of 100,000 people that was the hardest hit by the storm so far, authorities tried to get a handle on the extend of the death and destruction, but efforts were hampered by blocked roads, landslides and a lack of telephone service, said Police Commissioner Fitzroy Bedeau.
At least 22 people were killed in Grenada, Bedeau told the AP, including the drowned yachters, whose nationalities he did not know, people trapped in collapsed homes and a few elderly people who apparently died of shock.
"In another couple of days we may have better knowledge," of the number of deaths, he said. The U.S. Peace Corps was searching for three volunteers unaccounted for since the storm, the U.S. Embassy in Barbados said.
Ivan also killed one person in Tobago, four in Venezuela, one Canadian woman in Barbados, and four youngsters in the Dominican Republic who were swept away by a giant wave Thursday even though the storm was nearly 200 miles away.
"The destruction is worse than I've ever seen," said Michael Steele, a 34-year-old Grenada resident whose home was destroyed. "We're left with nothing."
House after house in the capital of St. George's was shredded by whipping winds. Stadium awnings collapsed, church roofs caved in and many trees snapped. Those left standing were stripped of leaves, giving a brownish tinge to debris-strewn hills overlooking the Caribbean Sea. "When dogs interfere with garbage bags and strew the contents all over the place — that's what Grenada looks like," Trinidadian leader Patrick Manning said after visiting the island Thursday. Manning met with Grenada's Prime Minister Keith Mitchell and said on his return home that among Grenada's priorities was bringing security to end looting and recapturing prisoners who were terrorizing already traumatized residents. More than 100 Caribbean soldiers from five countries arrived Thursday to help restore order on Grenada, and Manning said he would send more. Looting broke out Thursday as hundreds of people, including families with children, smashed storm shutters and shop windows to take televisions and shopping carts of food. Some carried away bed frames and mattresses. Police set up barricades on roads leading into the capital and ordered all but emergency workers off the streets. Many people, however, managed to get through and ignored the curfew. Wandering the streets in search of water, 30-year-old housewife Dawn Brown said she and her children had run from room to room as Ivan ripped sections off their roof. Eventually, the house was roofless and the family hid under a mattress as violent winds howled around them. "I stared death in its face. What could be more scary than that?" Brown said. Mitchell, the Grenadian leader, whose own home was flattened, said Ivan also devastated Grenada's important nutmeg crop and did major damage to the island's 17th century stone prison, allowing convicts to escape. Mitchell had said they included politicians jailed for killings in a 1983 coup that led the United States to invade, but Manning said Mitchell told him those prisoners, jailed for life, had remained in the ruined building. Nineteen Americans died in the invasion, along with some 45 Grenadians and 24 Cubans. |
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