Hurricane Dennis targets Cuba, heads for U.S. Gulf

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) – Hurricane Dennis, an extremely dangerous
storm with 135-mph (215-kph) winds, churned toward central Cuba
on Friday on track for the Florida Panhandle after causing
deadly floods in Haiti and mudslides in Jamaica.

Forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center said the
eye of Dennis would hit Cuba later on Friday and head into the
Gulf of Mexico, where U.S. oil companies prepared for a
possible threat to oil and gas rigs.

Hurricane winds and heavy rainfall knocked down power lines
and communication towers in southeastern Cuba, but the island
of 11 million braced for worse as Dennis headed for landfall
near the colonial town of Trinidad.

Cuba suspended all school classes and evacuated 200,000
people from coastal areas, including hundreds of tourists on
holiday on outlying islands.

Dennis was expected to barrel through central Cuba and head
toward Cuba’s main beach resort of Varadero, east of Havana.

As it took aim at the U.S. coast, residents were ordered to
evacuate Key West and the lower part of the Florida Keys, an
island chain connected to the southern tip of mainland Florida
by a single highway.

The storm was expected to brush past the Keys on Saturday
and pass close to key oil and gas fields off the coasts of
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, before slamming ashore on
Sunday night along the Florida Panhandle, which was hammered by
Hurricane Ivan last September.

NASA decided on Friday to leave space shuttle Discovery on
its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, but continued to
watch Dennis closely. A decision to roll Discovery back to its
hangar would have delayed the scheduled Wednesday launch of the
first shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster in 2003.

NASA managers said they expected only a 15 percent chance
of winds up to 46 mph (74 kph) at the launch site.

At 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), the center of Dennis was 230
miles southeast of Havana and had slowed its northwest movement
to 12 mph (19 kph), the hurricane center said.

Dennis strengthened rapidly on Thursday to a Category 4
storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale and is capable of
causing extreme damage.

DEATH IN HAITI

Heavy rain flooded parts of southern Haiti and forced
residents to flee their homes. One person was killed when a
tree fell on a house near the southern city of Les Cayes and
seven more were missing and feared dead after floods swept them
off a bridge in Grand-Goave southwest of Port-au-Prince, civil
protection spokesman Dieufort Deslorge said.

“I was going to cross the bridge, I was about 30 meters
(100 feet) away; suddenly, I saw it falling down,” said Jonas
Jean-Jacques, a young student. “There were several people
crossing at that time and all of them fell off.”

As Dennis moved toward Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands
discontinued hurricane warnings.

The storm drenched Jamaica on Thursday, triggering
mudslides that blocked roads as the core of the storm moved
north of the mountainous Caribbean island of 2.6 million. About
3,000 people moved to storm shelters in south-central Jamaica.

It also doused the Cayman Islands, a tiny British territory
and banking center with 43,000 residents. Hurricane Ivan
damaged or destroyed 70 percent of the buildings on Grand
Cayman Island in September.

“This was a close call and we are thankful to have been
spared,” said Donovan Ebanks, chairman of the Cayman Islands’
National Hurricane Committee. (Additional reporting by Joseph
Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince, Jim Loney in Miami, Michael
Peltier in Tallahassee and Irene Klotz at Cape Canaveral)