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Gustav: 'Mother of all storms'
Cubans returned from shelters to find flooded homes and washed-out roads yesterday, but no deaths were reported after a monstrous Hurricane Gustav roared across the island and into the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
- Agencies
- Published: 23:30 August 31, 2008
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Havana/Miami: Cubans returned from shelters to find flooded homes and washed-out roads yesterday, but no deaths were reported after a monstrous Hurricane Gustav roared across the island and into the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
About 250,000 Cubans were evacuated before Gustav made landfall on Cuba's Isla de la Juventud, then again on the Cuban mainland in the region that produces much of the tobacco used to make the nation's famed cigars.
It was just short of top-scale Category 5 hurricane with screaming 220 km/h winds as it moved across the island, toppling telephone poles and fruit trees, shattering windows and tearing off the tin roofs of homes.
A Cuban television reporter on the Isla de la Juventud said the storm had felt like "the blast wave from a bomb".
"Buildings without windows, without doors," he said. "Few trees remain standing."
Cuban Civil defence chief Ana Isa Delgado said there were "many people injured" on the island of 87,000 people. Nearly all the island's roads were washed out and some regions were heavily flooded. "It's been very difficult here," she said on state television.
But there were no reports of deaths, there or on the mainland.
Gustav earlier killed 81 people by triggering floods and landslides in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
The hurricane weakened slightly after crossing Cuba, slowing to Category 3 status before sunrise yesterday. But it still packed top winds near 195 km/h and forecasters predicted it would increase to a Category 4 before making landfall today along the US Gulf coast.
Mandatory evacuation
More than 1 million Americans made wary by Hurricane Katrina took buses, trains, planes and cars as they streamed out of New Orleans and other coastal cities, where Katrina killed about 1,600 people in 2005.
Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, which was devastated by Katrina, issued a mandatory evacuation order and warned that anyone found off their own property after it takes effect can be arrested. Police and National Guard troops were on the streets, preparing to patrol evacuated neighbourhoods.
Nagin called Gustav the "mother of all storms" and told residents to "get out of town. This is not the one to play with".
Cuba's top meteorologist, Jose Rubiera, said the storm brought hurricane-force winds to much of the western part of Havana, where power was knocked out as winds blasted sheets of rain sideways though the streets and whipped angry waves against the famed seaside Malecon boulevard. But yesterday morning no flooding could be seen in central Havana, and state radio said the damage was "minimal" in the capital of 2 million people, although southeastern Havana remained without power and natural gas.
Storm Hanna
Public transportation began running again yesterday morning, as did buses and trains from Havana to the provinces. State radio said schools would open today everywhere except Pinar del Rio.
While powerful Hurricane Gustav bore down on the US Gulf Coast yesterday, Tropical Storm Hanna swirled east of Florida, embedded in a complicated climatic environment that made it impossible to forecast its destination and likely strength.
The eighth tropical storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season could just as easily end up over Cuba, bring heavy rainfall to citrus country in central Florida or drift northward toward South Carolina. It was not possible to say if the storm might eventually end up in the US oil patch in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricane experts said.
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