Hurricane Wilma hammers Florida

MIAMI - Hurricane Wilma crashed into Florida on Monday, swamping the popular tourist island Key West and hammering the densely populated Miami-Fort Lauderdale area after killing 17 people in a rampage through the Caribbean.

Wilma hit the state as surprisingly strong Category 3 hurricane after feeding for days over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It later weakened to a Category 2 as it raced across the state in about four hours, but dealt a harsh blow.

A man died when a tree fell on him in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs, local officials said. The storm knocked out electricity to more than 3 million people, as it blasted beach sand across coastal roads and shredded power lines.

Wilma had weakened after hammering Cancun and Cozumel in Mexico for three days, but revved up to reach Florida with 200kmh winds. The winds slowed to 170kmh as it crossed the state.

The storm's power startled thousands of people in the vulnerable, low-lying Florida Keys who ignored evacuation orders.

Although the eye moved north of Key West, a powerful storm surge that in places had been expected to reach 5.5 metres washed through the Keys and left much of the tourist town made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway under water.

"There is massive flooding from tip to tip, 3 to 5 feet of water," Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson said.

Wilma lashed Cuba on its way east, paralysing Havana and flooding coastal neighbourhoods.

The eighth storm to hit Florida in the last 15 months, Wilma struck the mainland before dawn on the west coast near Naples and sped across the Everglades to the populous east coast, pounding Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, an area of 5 million people.

The worst of the storm's tidal surge struck a largely unpopulated area south of Naples. Search-and-rescue efforts were focused on Marco Island and Everglades City, two populated areas near Wilma's centre, state officials said.

The sprawling storm, about 645km across, covered much of the Florida peninsula. Some of its strongest winds whipped greater Miami, which alone had about 1.2 million customers, or 2.4 million people, without electricity, according to Florida Power & Light.

The company said it had 1.6 million customers without power in the state and had shut down three nuclear reactors.

Forecasters said Wilma, at one point the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, could prove to be the strongest storm in Miami since Hurricane Andrew caused more than $A25 billion in damage in August 1992.

"It's going to be the worst storm to hit us in 50 years," said Ken Jenne, the sheriff of Broward County, just north of Fort Lauderdale. He said at least one house had collapsed in the suburb of Pembroke Pines.

Fatigued after being forced to evacuate for three earlier hurricanes this season, no more than 7 percent of the Keys' 80,000 residents had fled ahead of Wilma, officials said.

Mary Casanova, a resident of a Key West mobile home park, weathered the storm in a downtown hotel but many of her neighbours decided to ride it out in their flimsy trailers on the islands, which are no more than five metres above sea level at their highest point.

"I'm just praying that we just have a trailer out there," said Casanova.

Wilma was the eighth hurricane to strike Florida in about 15 months -- an unprecedented display of nature's fury.

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, which ends on November 30, became the busiest since records began 150 years ago with the formation on Saturday of the 22nd named tropical cyclone, Alpha.

It also boasts three of the most-intense Atlantic storms on record, with Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in August and killed 1200, Rita, which hit the Texas-Louisiana border a few weeks later, and now Wilma, the storm with the lowest barometric pressure reading ever observed in the Atlantic.

In Mexico, Wilma caused severe damage in Cancun and on the island of Cozumel off the Yucatan.

Many of the 20,000 or more tourists stranded on the "Maya Riviera" were short of food and water.

The storm killed seven people in Mexico, fewer than many had feared. It killed 10 people in Haiti last week after spawning mudslides in the impoverished Caribbean country.

In Cuba, 138kmh wind gusts howled through Havana, knocking down lamp posts and smashing windows.

Roaring seas crashed over Havana's Malecon famed sea wall on Monday, flooding coastal neighbourhoods and paralysing the city of 2 million. Rescuers used row boats and makeshift rafts to ferry stranded residents to higher ground.

"I've never seen the sea come in so far, not even in the storm of the century (in 1993), and it is still rising," said Edith Valdez, a 44-year resident of Central Havana.

The deepest floods were around the Riviera Hotel, build by Mafia boss Meyer Lansky before President Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. The Cuban capital was without power.

- REUTERS