Hurricane Ernesto weakened to a tropical storm after killing at least one person in Haiti on Sunday and forecasters said it could regain hurricane strength as it barreled toward south-eastern Cuba and the Florida Keys.
Florida declared a state of emergency and ordered tourists out of the vulnerable Keys as Ernesto brought a reminder of the perils of the Atlantic hurricane season almost a year to the day since Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans.
Several oil companies moved personnel from rigs off the Gulf Coast, where a quarter of United States oil and gas is pumped.
Cuba, facing its first big storm in decades without ailing Fidel Castro at the helm, evacuated 300 000 people from eastern provinces where Ernesto was expected to hit the Sierra Maestra mountain range early on Monday and dump torrential rainfall.
Tens of thousands of Cubans were transported from coastal and mountain villages in buses and trucks.
But beach resort hotels on keys off Cuba’s north coast, where the storm was expected to enter the Florida Straits on Tuesday, said they had not decided whether it was necessary to evacuate hundreds of European tourists.
There was no sign of Raul Castro, the younger brother to whom Fidel Castro (80) has temporarily handed power while recovering from intestinal surgery.
Forecasters downgraded Ernesto as it skirted the south of Haiti where mountains slowed its winds. Ernesto’s centre was 185km from Guantanamo at Cuba’s south-eastern tip at 11pm EDT (3am GMT on Monday) and maximum winds were about 85kph, the US National Hurricane Centre said. The storm was moving north-west at 12kph.
A Haitian woman died after huge waves from Ernesto’s storm surge swept ashore on Ile-de-Vache, a southern island, and destroyed her home, said Joseph-Marie Yves Aubourg, the government representative in the town of Les Cayes.
There was an unconfirmed report of another death in the port city of Gonaives, where tropical storm flooding killed 3 000 people two years ago. Ernesto was flooding streets throughout Haiti and destroyed at least 13 homes on the island of La Gonave, officials said.
Forecasters said Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, could see up to 50cm of rain.
Emergency supplies were being sent to affected areas, UN peacekeepers were being mobilised and about 25 families were being moved from a flood-prone slum in the capital, Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis said.
New Orleans breathes easier
Residents of battered New Orleans breathed easier as the season’s first hurricane looked like it would miss the jazz city, but raised alarms in Florida, weary from eight hurricanes in the past two years.
The hurricane centre said Ernesto could strengthen again before reaching Cuba, weaken once more over land, and then become a hurricane again in the Gulf with winds of about 137kph as it approached Florida’s south-west coast.
”I expect it to come off the north coast of Cuba as a tropical storm and then … over the Florida Straits we think that it has a very good chance of intensifying again,” hurricane centre Director Max Mayfield said.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency, paving the way for federal disaster aid should it be needed.
Emergency managers ordered visitors to leave the Keys, a low-lying, 177km island chain off Florida’s southern tip. The islands were put under a hurricane watch, alerting residents to possible storm conditions in 36 hours.
New Orleans, still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina’s blow last August 29, appeared safe.
”We done had our time last year,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said at the dedication of a monument to Katrina victims.
Katrina killed about 1 500 people on the Gulf Coast and caused more than $80-billion in damage. – Reuters