JAMAICA: Jamaicans rushed to supermarkets and schools closed as Hurricane Ivan swept toward the Caribbean island with 160-m.p.h. winds yesterday after killing at least 20 people on the tiny island of Grenada.
Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson urged Jamaica's 2.7 million people to get ready as Ivan grew to a Category 5 storm, the most intense on the scale.
"All persons should prepare to relocate to shelters as soon as the Office of Disaster Preparedness instructs them to," Patterson told Jamaicans. "It is better for us to breathe a sigh of relief, than for us to say, 'If we had known'."
Residents of the US state of Florida braced themselves for their third storm since last month, having already been hit by hurricanes Charley and Frances.
Emergency managers in the Florida Keys area ordered a mandatory evacuation for visitors, a measure taken well in advance because tourists need time to move recreational vehicles and boats up the 100-mile island chain, linked by a single road. An evacuation of Keys' residents was to begin today.
The Cayman Islands, a tiny British colony and key offshore financial centre in the northwestern Caribbean, issued a hurricane watch for its 43,000 people, telling them hurricane conditions were possible within 36 hours.
In Jamaica, some petrol stations in the capital, Kingston, ran out of fuel and long queues formed at food stores. The government ordered schools to be closed and three universities shut their doors. Diplomatic missions shut down and the government urged employers to close by noon yesterday.
"This one looks like a killer. If it follows the same path, a lot of us will die," Kingston resident Jefferson James said.
The storm revived memories of Hurricane Gilbert, which hit Jamaica in September 1988. It was a Category 5 hurricane also and it was one of the most powerful storms in the recorded history of the Atlantic basin.
Ivan slammed into Grenada, a volcanic island of 90,000 people in the southeastern Caribbean, on Tuesday, flattening or badly damaging homes and cutting power supplies.
"Our diplomats are reporting that there are 20 confirmed deaths," said a US State Department official in Washington.
The airport in the former British colony was closed and phone service was interrupted, so the extent of the damage emerged slowly. A videotape shot from a British naval helicopter showed widespread destruction with buildings flattened, roofs ripped off houses and major flooding.
Prime Minister Keith Mitchell told BBC Radio: "We have got a tremendous hit that we never expected - you are talking hundreds of millions of dollars of damage.
"I am pretty sure we have taken a tremendous hit in the nutmeg industry, which is a key barometer of our economic development." Grenada's capital, St George's, was devastated. The storm destroyed the emergency operations centre, the prime minister's residence, the prison, several schools, and also damaged the main hospital.
In addition to the 20 reported deaths in Grenada, Ivan was blamed for the death of a woman who was killed when a tree fell into her home in Trinidad and Tobago, and of a swimmer in Venezuela who was swept away by waves north of Caracas.
The US National Hurricane Centre said Ivan was moving west-northwest at 15 m.p.h. (24 k.p.h.). The centre's long-range forecast, which is subject to change, had Ivan reaching Cuba by Sunday and Florida on Monday.
Storm alerts were also issued for the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the poor Caribbean nation that is prone to deadly flash floods and mudslides.
Hurricane Charley struck south-west Florida on August 13th and Frances, a weaker but larger hurricane, swamped the state last weekend.