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KINGSTON - Fiercely powerful Hurricane Dean strafed Jamaica's southern coast this morning, littering the capital of Kingston with fallen trees and windblown roofs after killing six people earlier on its run through the Caribbean.
Dean was an "extremely dangerous" Category 4 hurricane, the second-highest on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, and could become a potentially catastrophic Category 5 near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the US National Hurricane Center said.
Jamaica's government declared a 48-hour curfew and the power company switched off electricity as the wind began to howl and pounding waves battered the southern coast.
Sheets of rain pelted Kingston and streets were blocked by toppled trees and utility poles. Dean ripped off several roofs and a man was missing after falling trees tore into his house.
"The dead center of the eye is south of Jamaica by a few miles. But the center is close enough to Jamaica that they are likely getting hurricane-force winds along the southern coast," said Richard Knabb, a storm expert at the hurricane center.
Mudslides were reported in several parts of the mountainous country of 3 million people.
Local media reported 17 fishermen and women had been stranded ahead of the storm on the Pedro Cays, a small island chain in the open sea about 80km south of Kingston, directly in the path of the hurricane.
They were told to break into a coast guard building for shelter but officials did not know if they had done that.
The government had urged residents to go to shelters. But many people, including those in one low-lying seaport town close to Kingston, refused to flee.
"We are going nowhere," Byron Thompson said in the former buccaneer town of Port Royal, settled by pirate Henry Morgan in the 16th century. "In fact, if you come by here later today you will see me drinking rum over in that bar with some friends."
Earlier in the day, tempers flared in shops where Jamaicans scrambled to stock up on batteries, flashlights, canned tuna, rice and water. Campaigning for August 27 elections was halted.
Dean packed sustained winds of 230 km/h and its eye was about 115 km west-southwest of Kingston at 8 pm EDT (11am NZT).
Storm warnings were also in effect for the Cayman Islands and parts of Mexico, Cuba, Haiti and Belize. The latest computer tracking models forecast Dean would spare the US Gulf Coast but slam into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, cross the Bay of Campeche and then hit central Mexico.
Thousands of frightened tourists on Mexico's Caribbean coast stood in line for hours at airports to flee before Dean's expected arrival on Monday.
One man was killed in Haiti when a tree fell on a house and a woman died in a mudslide in the impoverished country of 8 million, civil defence officials said.
That brought to at least six the number killed by Dean since it roared between the Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and St. Lucia on Friday as the first hurricane of what is expected to be an active 2007 Atlantic storm season.
Landslides also destroyed several hundred houses in southern Haiti and dozens in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, officials said.
Risk modelling company EQECAT Inc. estimated insured losses from Dean's rampage through the Caribbean islands at US$1.5 billion to US$3 billion, most of it in Jamaica.
Dean was moving west at 32 km/h and was being watched closely by energy markets, which have been nervous since a series of storms in 2004 and 2005 toppled Gulf of Mexico oil rigs, flooded refineries and cut pipelines.
Mexico's Pemex oil company started to evacuate 13,360 workers from its Gulf rigs.
The US space shuttle Endeavour hastily left the orbiting International Space Station in order to land a day early in case the storm forced Nasa to evacuate its Houston center.
Airlines added flights to ferry tourists from the Caymans. Hoteliers on the famed Seven Mile Beach laid out sandbags, cut down coconuts to keep them from becoming windborne missiles and moved guests and furniture to safer midlevel floors.
Category 5 hurricanes are rare but in 2005 there were four, including Katrina, reinforcing research that suggests global warming may increase the strength of tropical cyclones.
- REUTERS
