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Hurricane hits Mexico
21/10/2005 15:18 - (SA)
Cancun - The fearsome core of Hurricane Wilma slammed into the island of Cozumel early on Friday, starting a long, grinding march across Mexico's resort-studded coastline, where thousands of stranded tourists hunkered down in shelters and hotel ballrooms.
Forecasters at the National Hurricane Centre in Miami said the hurricane's eyewall - the fastest-moving section surrounding the eye - had hit Cozumel, a popular stop for divers and cruise ship passengers where hundreds of residents and 970 tourists were riding out the hurricane.
The hurricane was expected to make an agonisingly slow journey to the tip of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and sideswipe Cuba - 220 km east of Cancun - then swing east toward hurricane-weary Florida.
Cuba evacuated nearly 370 000 people in the face of the storm, which has already killed at least 13 people in Haiti and Jamaica.
Protecting lives
"The most important thing now... is to protect lives," President Vicente Fox said in a broadcast address to the nation on Thursday night.
Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami said the storm "has the potential to do catastrophic damage."
With winds of 230km/h, Wilma is more powerful than Hurricane Katrina at the time it plowed into the United States Gulf Coast on August 29, killing more than 1 200 people.
While the wall of the eye had hit, the hurricane centre said that the large, slow-moving centre of the storm was still about 80km southeast of Cozumel.
After airports closed late on Thursday, desperate tourists who had lined up for hours in a failed bid to get on the last planes out were instead shuttled to sweaty emergency shelters.
About 20 000 tourists remained at shelters and hotels on the mainland south of Cancun, and an estimated 10 000 to 12 000 in the city itself.
Some, like 30-year-old Carlos Porta of Barcelona, Spain, were handed plastic bags with a pillow and blanket.
"From a luxury hotel to a shelter. It makes you angry. But what can you do?" he said. "It's just bad luck."
In Cancun, high winds bent palm trees and waves gobbled the city's white-sand beaches. Nearly 50 hotels were evacuated, leaving the normally busy tourist zone deserted.
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