A weakened Hurricane Ike swept toward western Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico oil fields on Monday after its high winds and heavy rains ripped a wide swath of destruction through the eastern side of the island, killing at least four people.
With top sustained winds of 130km/h, Ike had fallen to a category-one storm after it blew into the Caribbean Sea and hugged the Cuban coast. The storm was moving west-northwest at 3am GMT Tuesday at 20km/h and was about 225km south-east of Havana.
State-run Cuban media reported widespread damage throughout the eastern provinces and showed videos of toppled trees, destroyed homes, downed power lines and flooded towns, inundated by up to 25cm of rain, swollen rivers and, along the coast, a surging sea.
Cuban television said four people died in the storm, including two men who were electrocuted when they tried to take down an antenna that fell into an electric line, a woman killed when her house collapsed and a man crushed when a tree blew over on to his home. Hurricane deaths are rare in Cuba where the government conducts mass evacuations.
The Cuban weather service said Ike was unlikely to regain strength before coming ashore unless it moved away from land, where the 32 degrees Celsius waters of the Caribbean could fire it up.
Forecasts called for Ike to take a path similar to that of Hurricane Gustav, which devastated the Isle of Youth and the western province of Pinar del Rio with 240 km/h winds and two days later hit Louisiana on the US Gulf Coast.
It was expected to emerge into the Gulf on Tuesday and regain strength on a path through the heart of the offshore oil fields that produce a quarter of US oil and 15% of its natural gas.
Energy companies, which shut down most Gulf oil and gas production during Gustav, delayed restarting the flow because of Ike, which was likely to pare inventories in coming weeks. Shell oil company and other energy companies said they were evacuating workers from offshore rigs.
Economic toll
The US National Hurricane Centre said the storm was pointed toward Texas. New Orleans, the city swamped in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina killed 1 500 people and caused $80-billion in damage along the US Gulf Coast, appeared an increasingly unlikely target after the hurricane centre shifted Ike’s expected track southward late on Monday.
Gustav just missed low-lying New Orleans, which is protected by floodwalls and levees.
Ike tore roofs off houses when it hit Britain’s Turks and Caicos Islands as a ferocious category-four hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale, and floods triggered by its torrential rains were blamed for at least 66 deaths in Haiti, where Tropical Storm Hanna killed 500 last week.
The US Navy ship, Kearsarge, arrived near Haiti on Monday with eight helicopters and three landing craft to help deliver relief supplies, the US military said.
Cuba evacuated 1,8-million people ahead of Ike.
The storm was expected to take a toll on the economy of Cuba, still reeling from the destruction of more than 100 000 homes by Gustav.
As it passed over the eastern provinces, Ike swept through the main growing regions for sugar and coffee and shut down Cuba’s nickel mines and processing plants.
People in the stricken area reported that Ike stripped ripening beans from coffee bushes and levelled fields of sugar cane as it pounded the area for hours.
Sugar prices rose as Ike moved across the key Caribbean growing region.
Production of nickel, the island’s top export, was stopped as the storm approached on Sunday and remained closed Monday. Nickel production is located in the state of Holguin, where Ike made landfall on Sunday with 195km/h winds and which bore the full brunt of the storm.
”There is a lot of wind and rain. We’re worried,” said Carmen, a housewife in the city of Trinidad on Cuba’s southern coast. ”We don’t have electricity, we’re waiting to see what happens.” — Reuters