Killer hurricane batters Bahamas, heads to Cuba
CAMAGUEY, Cuba — Hurricane Ike roared across low-lying islands and bore down on Cuba, destroying homes, sweeping away boats and bringing more rain to waterlogged communities Sunday in Haiti, where it killed 48 more people.
Slamming into the southern Bahamas, Ike approached Cuba on a path that could hit Havana head-on, and hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated to shelters or higher ground. To the north, residents of the Florida Keys fled up a narrow highway, fearful that the “extremely dangerous” hurricane could hit them Tuesday.
Where Ike will go after it hits Cuba was hard to predict, leaving millions from Florida to Mexico worrying where it will strike.
“These storms have a mind of their own,” Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said as tourists and then residents evacuated the Keys along a narrow highway.
In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal and New Orleans Mayor
C. Ray Nagin prepared for the possibility of more havoc only days after a historic, lifesaving evacuation of more than 2 million people from Hurricane Gustav.
“Our citizens are weary, and they’re tired, and they have spent a lot of money evacuating,” Nagin worried. “It will be very difficult to move the kind of numbers out of this city that we moved during Gustav.”
At least 48 people died as Ike’s winds and rain swept Haiti, raising the nation’s death toll from four tropical storms in less than a month to 306. A Dominican man was crushed by a falling tree. It was too early to know of deaths on other islands where the most powerful winds were still blowing.
The center of the hurricane hit the Bahamas’ Great Inagua Island, where screaming winds threatened to peel plywood from the windows of a church sheltering about 50 people, shelter manager Janice McKinney said.
At nightfall, Ike’s eye moved west from Great Inagua in the southeastern Bahamas and weakened slightly to a Category 3 hurricane with top winds of 120 mph. It was moving westward at 14 mph, about 30 miles off Cuba’s northern coast, and was about 75 miles from Guantanamo.
The U. S. National Hurricane Center predicted that Ike’s eye would strike somewhere along Cuba’s northern coast Sunday night and possibly hit Havana, the capital of 2 million people with many vulnerable old buildings, by tonight.
The first islands to bear Ike’s fury were the Turks and Caicos, which have little natural protection from storm surges. This one was expected to be up to 18 feet.
The British territory’s Premier Michael Misick said more than 80 percent of the homes were damaged on two islands and people who didn’t take refuge in shelters were cowering in closets and under stairwells, “just holding on for life.”
Many more Haitian lives were threatened as Ike’s downpours topped flooding from Hanna, Gustav and Fay. Officials said they would have to open an overflowing dam, inundating more homes and possibly causing lasting damage to key farming areas. The Mirebalais bridge collapsed in the floods, cutting off the last land route into Gonaives, where half the homes were already under water when Ike hit. The latest rains made it even more difficult for aid groups to reach desperate residents.
Heavy rains also pelted the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, where about 4,000 people were evacuated from northern coastal towns.
Strong gusts and steady rains fell at the U. S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in southeast Cuba, where all ferries were secured and beaches were off limits.
