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Wilma pounds Florida
24/10/2005 23:42 - (SA)
Naples - Hurricane Wilma furiously cut across Florida on Monday, killing one person and leaving more than three million homes without power after churning huge waves that flooded Cuba's capital Havana.
The storm killed at least 10 people in its violent passage through Mexico's Yucatan peninsula over the weekend, where tens of thousands of American and European tourists were forced to flee resorts or hide in shelters.
In Florida, police said a man was killed after being pinned by a falling tree.
In Cuba, four people, including three foreign tourists, were killed in a bus accident as they evacuated on Friday before the storm slammed the island.
Wilma slashed across Florida as a Category Two storm in the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale before regaining strength just off the Atlantic coast, where it grew into a Category Three hurricane, according to the Miami-based national hurricane centre (NHC). Huge power outage
A hurricane warning remained in effect for parts of the state's east coast. The storm was moving northeast, blowing winds of 185km/h, according to the NHC's 18:30 GMT advisory.
The storm left about 3.2 million homes without power in southeast Florida, affecting about six million people, according to Florida power and light. It will take weeks to restore power to all customers, the company said.
Governor Jeb Bush urged residents who missed the chance to flee to ride out the raging storm indoors.
"Please hunker down," he said at a news conference. "Just stay in your homes until the storm has passed."
The acting chief of the federal emergency management agency, David Paulison, urged those who evacuated to wait until authorities give them the green light to go home.
"Please, please don't go back until the local emergency managers tell you it's safe to go back," Paulison said in a news conference. 'Stay inside'
But many had ignored the evacuation calls in the southwest city of Naples and in the Florida Keys island chain south of Florida.
"If you did not evacuate, stay inside until everything is safe. "Make sure the winds die down because we get more injuries after the storm than during the storm," Paulison said. "We want you to just be careful."
Jeb Bush's brother, President George W Bush, declared a major disaster in Florida, releasing federal funds to supplement state and local recovery efforts, and that emergency aid had been deployed.
"We have prepositioned food, medicine, communications equipment, urban search and rescue teams," Bush said after a meeting of his cabinet.
Bush was keen to show the government was well-prepared for the disaster after his administration was heavily criticised for its slow response to Hurricane Katrina, which claimed more than 1 200 lives after it struck the southern US coast on August 29. Flooding
South of the Florida Keys in Cuba, Havana residents woke up to inundated streets as sea water was washed into parts of the city. Western regions of the Caribbean island also suffered serious flooding, with some residents saying it was the worst storm to hit the island in 12 years.
In Mexico, the death toll rose to 10 after Wilma slammed the touristic Yucatan peninsula.
Some 250 police and troops patrolled the streets of Cancun on Monday to deter looters who had taken advantage of the natural disaster a day earlier. Authorities fired warning shots and tear gas to disperse looters overnight, a municipal official said. A curfew was put in place on Monday.
More than 71 000 people, many of them foreign tourists, remained in emergency shelters for a third day, unable to leave because of the floods and damage.
- AFP
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