Hurricane Paloma battered south-eastern Cuba with roaring winds, heavy rains and a surging sea when it crashed ashore on Saturday as the third major storm to hit the island this year.
State-run television showed waves whipping up over coastal barriers and trees bending in the wind as Paloma came in from the Caribbean as a category-three storm with top winds of 200km/h after losing steam as it neared land.
It had grown to a category four on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale with 230km/h winds while barging through the wealthy Cayman Islands, where it ripped roofs off houses and storm shelters and flooded streets in knee-high water.
In Santa Cruz del Sur, Cuba, residents said the wind was howling and the rain coming down in sheets as they took shelter from Paloma.
”The weather is really bad. It’s raining heavily and the wind is blowing strong,” said a woman called Mirtha, who was on watch in the town’s Communist Party headquarters.
”I almost cannot open the windows but I can see some small palm trees that have fallen over,” said the woman, who declined to give her full name.
”I’m two kilometers from the sea, but the wind is very strong. This would scare anybody,” said Jose Marino (73).
A storm surge of up to 7,6m had been predicted, but was likely to be less due to Paloma’s weakening, Cuba’s chief meteorologist, Jose Rubiera, said on state-run television.
Even so, he said the sea had flooded inland by at least 700m.
Paloma came on the heels of hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which caused an estimated $8-billion in damages when they devastated Cuba in August and September.
It was the second most powerful hurricane recorded in the month of November and struck almost 76 years to the day after a November 9 1932 cyclone that killed 3 000 in the same region.
Knocked down
Cuba said more than a million people had been evacuated ahead of the storm. So far, no deaths or injuries had been reported, but the storm promised to set back recovery efforts from Ike, which struck in the same region then rampaged across much of the country.
”It’s been such an effort to repair what Ike destroyed and now Paloma may knock it all down again. It’s as if you finally dug yourself out of a hole in the ground and were pushed right back in,” construction worker Orlando Estrada said from Holguin.
Ike and Gustav damaged almost 450 000 homes and devastated crops, compounding Cuba’s economic woes at a time when its new President Raul Castro, who took over from his brother Fidel Castro in February, had already warned of belt-tightening because of global financial turmoil.
In a statement published on Saturday, Fidel Castro rejected any aid from arch foe the United States before it was even offered, demanding instead that Washington lift economic sanctions tightened by US President George Bush.
The eighth hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic storm season pounded the British Caribbean territory of the Cayman Islands overnight. George Town, the capital of the islands, one of the world’s biggest offshore financial centers, appeared to have escaped the worst but there were reports of heavier damage in the smaller islands of Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.
The storm’s winds were ”like a brick slamming against a wall”, said Moses Kirkconnell, a government minister for the smaller Cayman Islands. ”We have got major damage but no major casualties,” he said.
On Cayman Brac, two hurricane shelters lost their roofs during the hurricane, according to reports. In one shelter, people huddled in the kitchen until they could be evacuated.
The storm surge swamped the island’s air strip and left many areas under knee-deep water. – Reuters