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'Only thing left is the sun'
26/10/2005 08:29 - (SA)
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| Niurka Valido patiently waits to enter the Orange Bowl in Miami on Tuesday, to get water and ice. Officials said it could take weeks for Florida's most heavily populated region to return to normal. (Patrick Farrell, Miami Herald/AP) |
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Miami - Massive power outages and curfews to prevent looting slowed recovery efforts on Tuesday along the path of deadly Hurricane Wilma, which blasted through Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Cuba and Florida with intense winds and rains over the last five days.
The Mexican government flew soldiers and federal police into the resort city of Cancun to bolster local police overwhelmed by the devastation and the crime wave Wilma left in its wake.
As tens of thousands of tourists and Mexicans scrambled to leave the city, its airport reopened only for emergency aid flights and to ferry out tourists and people with serious injuries.
A French tour operator, Nouvelles Frontieres, said in Paris it had chartered aircraft to bring home hundreds of French, British and Belgian tourists stuck in Mexico.
Sparse
In Cuba, where injury and damage reports remained sparse, authorities said they were beginning to send back some of the nearly 800 000 residents evacuated from the west end of the island in advance of the storm.
In southern Florida, some three million clients remained without electric power and several cities and counties declared curfews to prevent any outbreak of looting.
At least 18 people were reported dead in the storm's violent passage from the Yucatan to Florida before it headed north, away from land, over the Atlantic Ocean.
Four were killed in Florida, according to the Miami Herald, including two men killed by falling trees, one woman by flying debris and another man by a collapsing roof.
Another four people, including three foreign tourists, were reported dead in Cuba in a bus accident as they evacuated on Friday before the storm slammed the island.
Blasting
Ten others were killed in various incidents in Mexico, where Wilma hovered almost motionless for 36 hours, blasting winds of 160km/h through the world-famous resorts of the so-called Mexican Riviera.
Electricity and telephone services were partially restored in areas of the premier resort of Cancun on Tuesday, where looters had brazenly walked into shops and homes on Sunday and Monday to carry off everything of value.
On Tuesday, Cancun's mayor ordered people to stay at home after 19:00 local time while federal police and soldiers beefed up street patrols.
A curfew was also ordered on Cozumel, the resort island off the Cancun coast.
Yucatan area hoteliers called for heavy federal aid to restore operations for the all-important winter season.
Jesus Almaguer, head of the Quintana Roo hotelier association, predicted it would take three to four months to get back to normal after the storm left 95 percent of the hotels uninhabitable, due mainly to downed infrastructure.
But Wilma also wiped out 28km of the region's gleaming sandy beaches. "Now the only thing left is the sun; it is a destination of sun and stones," city councillor Alain Serrat told the Reformation newspaper.
- AFP
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