|
Tourists flee in Mexico from
huge hurricane
Catherine Bremer
Reuters
Monday Aug 20, 2007
Thousands of tourists headed for makeshift shelters
on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Monday to escape from Hurricane
Dean, a potentially catastrophic storm which killed nine people
in the Caribbean.
Police ordered vehicles off the road and banned the sale of alcohol
on the "Mayan Riviera", a strip of beach resorts with
bright white sands that is yet to fully recover from the devastation
of Hurricane Wilma in 2005.
With winds near 150 mph (240 kph), Dean was likely to become
a rare Category 5 -- the strongest type of hurricane -- before
making landfall near Mexico's border with Belize early on Tuesday,
the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The approaching storm brought back nightmare memories of Wilma,
the strongest Atlantic storm recorded, which wrecked Cancun and
other beach resorts. It washed away whole beaches, killed seven
people and caused $2.6 billion in damages.
(Article continues below)
"A Category 5 is horrible. We've been through that,"
said . Marcos Ruiz, 31, a tourism ministry official in the resort
of Tulum, just north of Dean's path. "The wind is so strong
you can't breathe."
Popular with European tourists, Tulum was particularly in danger
as many of its arty hotels and cabins are built next to the sea.
Thousands of tourists and local residents were told to go to
2,000 shelters across the Yucatan Peninsula,
"I hate the waiting," said Scottish film producer Abbie
Harper, 27, one of 150 tourists in Tulum who were taken further
inland to a cramped hotel without air conditioning.
Belize, a former British colony that is home to some 250,000
people and a famous barrier reef, was also in Dean's sights. Prime
Minister Said Musa went into an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss
contingency plans and heavy rain began to fall in Belize City.
SPACE SHUTTLE
Dean swiped Jamaica at the weekend with howling winds and pelting
rain. Roads were blocked by toppled trees and power poles. A man
had been reported missing in Jamaica but police said they could
not confirm any casualties
The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour is to return to Earth from the
International Space Station a day early in case the storm forces
NASA to evacuate its Houston center.
Some 70,000 tourists have fled Cancun and the nearby area in
recent days but the resort, whose five-star hotels were gutted
by ferocious wind and waves in 2005, was not forecast to take
a major hit this time around.
The few tourists still left there wandered through stores picking
up food and drink.
The windows of shops and restaurants on the vacation island of
Cozumel, a major scuba diving center, were boarded up as winds
slowly began to get stronger.
Poor local residents with badly built homes are often the worst
hit by hurricanes in Mexico.
"Let's see if the house can stand it. If not, we'll go to
the shelter," said Luisa Villafana, 27, an office cleaner
who shares a thatched-roof home with eight other people near the
town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto.
Category 5 hurricanes are rare but in 2005 there were four, including
Katrina which devastated New Orleans. The number of high power
storms is reinforcing research that suggests global warming may
increase the strength of tropical cyclones.
The latest computer tracking models forecast the hurricane would
spare the U.S. Gulf Coast but cross the Yucatan to the Campeche
Sound in the southern Gulf of Mexico and then hit central Mexico.
Mexico is closing and evacuating all of its 407 oil and gas wells
in the Campeche Sound due to Hurricane Dean, meaning lost production
of 2.65 million barrels of crude per day.
Four people were killed by the storm in Haiti, U.N. officials
said, putting the number killed at nine since Dean roared into
the Caribbean.
Dean was on Monday passing more than 125 miles to the southwest
of the tiny Cayman Islands, a British territory in the western
Caribbean.
|
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
|
