Hurricane Dennis strengthened with winds of 168kph on Thursday and threatened to become a major storm as it uprooted trees and flooded homes in southern Haiti and swept away a car in Jamaica, readying for a direct strike.
Thunderstorms covered all of the Dominican Republic and southern Haiti. The Cayman Islands and Cuba also were under hurricane warnings, including the United States detention camp holding about 520 terror suspects in Guantánamo Bay.
The Florida Keys went on hurricane watch on Thursday, and the southern Florida peninsula on tropical-storm watch, expecting stormy conditions within 36 hours.
Rivers burst their banks in dangerously deforested Haiti, where wind gusts uprooted a palm tree and flung it into a mud hut, injuring two people who were hospitalised in southern Les Cayes town.
Dennis strengthened into a hurricane on Wednesday and became a category-two storm on Thursday morning, as well as the third storm to threaten petroleum output in the Gulf of Mexico.
Forecasters at the US Hurricane Centre in Miami said the storm could strike the US anywhere from Florida to Louisiana on Sunday or Monday. Private forecaster AccuWeather put US Gulf of Mexico oil and gas producing facilities right into the storm’s path.
Oil futures rose sharply on Wednesday on concerns about the storm, but were down nearly $2 on Thursday morning at $59,35 a barrel, as a series of terrorist blasts in London led investors to abandon riskier investments.
Dennis came right behind Tropical Storm Cindy, which made landfall late on Tuesday in Louisiana and hindered oil production and refining. On Thursday, remnants of Cindy dumped heavy rain in parts of the Carolinas, prompting flash flood and tornado watches.
”It is possible that Dennis may become a major hurricane,” the US National Hurricane Centre warned from Miami.
Lead forecaster Martin Nelson said it is the first time the Atlantic season has had four named storms this early since record-keeping began in 1851. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30.
Packing sustained winds near 168kph, the fourth storm of the Atlantic season — and its first hurricane — could dump up to 38cm of rain over mountains in its path, including Jamaica’s coffee-producing Blue Mountains, according to the US National Hurricane Centre.
Tropical-storm-force winds reached eastern Jamaica.
”Regardless of landfall, Jamaica will have impacts from the system practically all day and into the evening hours,” warned forecaster Dave Roberts, of the hurricane centre.
In southern Haiti, wind gusts whipped sheets of rain that flooded roads and homes with up to 90cm of debris-filled water. Tin roofs torn from homes and businesses tumbled in the wind.
United Nations mission spokesperson Damian Onses-Cardona said the biggest concern is that the rains will cause landslides on denuded mountains: ”People build houses on the hills, without following any specifications, and then landslides occur, like last year in Gonaives.”
Last year, three catastrophic hurricanes — Frances, Ivan and Jeanne — tore through the Caribbean with a collective ferocity not seen in years, causing hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damages.
Haiti, which began suffering from the storm early on Thursday, took the deadliest hit of last year’s hurricane season when Jeanne, at the time a tropical storm, triggered flooding and mudslides: 1 500 people were killed, 900 missing and presumed dead and 200 000 left homeless. Torrential rains burst river banks and irrigation canals and unleashed mudslides that destroyed thousands of acres of fertile land in Haiti.
Poverty-stricken Haitians said there was little they could do about the warnings this time.
”It’s not only that we don’t have money to prepare, we don’t have money either to eat. We are willing to stay here and let whatever happens happen,” said Martine Louis-Pierre, a 43-year-old mother of three.
At 3pm GMT, the storm was centred 125km east of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, moving toward the north-west at 20kph, the hurricane centre said.
Hurricane-force winds extended up to 75km from the centre and tropical-storm-force winds another 220km.
In the southern Haitian town of Les Cayes, Jose Luis Paez, assistant chief of operations for UN civilian police, said 600 civilian police were trying to evacuate people from low-lying areas, but some refused.
Jasmine Romelus, a 22-year-old student, was among them.
”Hurricane?” she asked. ”They always say there’s going to be a hurricane and it never comes.”
Jamaicans also were ignoring warnings, with mayor George Lee of Kingston’s Portmore suburb complaining to RJR radio: ”We have gone around all night to tell the people … to come to the shelter, but very few persons have taken advantage of that opportunity.”
Still, more than 700 residents of several flood-prone communities along Jamaica’s south coast were evacuated on Wednesday night, the radio station reported.
It said one man narrowly escaped injury late on Wednesday after fast-moving flood waters swept away his car in eastern St Thomas parish, where hundreds of coastal farmers and fishermen were cut off by the storm.
Schools in Jamaica are closed until Friday for use as shelters.
The highway from Kingston’s international airport to town was flooded on Wednesday and that airport was closed. So was the international airport at western Montego Bay resort, and Air Jamaica cancelled all flights.
Inside the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military played audio tapes in at least eight languages warning that a storm was coming and heavy steel shutters would be closed on some cell windows, said Colonel Mike Bumgarner.
Military officials have no immediate plans to evacuate troops or detainees at Camp Delta, which is about 135m from the ocean but was built to withstand winds up to 150kph, according to navy Commander Anne Reese.
Power lines could be knocked down and roofs could be damaged on some older, wooden buildings, Reese said.
”It will be bad, but it’s not going to be very destructive,” she said. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writers Ben Fox in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Stevenson Jacobs in Kingston, Jamaica, contributed to this report