Hurricane Dennis targets Cuba, U.S. Gulf

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) – Hurricane Dennis gathered strength with
extremely dangerous 150-mph (240-kph) winds as it bore down on
central Cuba on Friday and was on track for the U.S. Gulf of
Mexico, where oil companies began evacuating workers from rigs.

Forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center said the
eye of Dennis would hit Cuba on Friday afternoon and head into
the eastern Gulf early on Saturday.

Dennis is the strongest Atlantic hurricane to form this
early in the season since records began in 1851, the center
said.

Chevron Corp said it evacuated all workers from the central
and eastern Gulf where oil and gas rigs could be at risk. Shell
Oil Co. said it evacuated 555 workers from Gulf operations as a
precaution, and that more evacuations were expected.

Dennis was keeping the price of crude above $60 a barrel,
New York traders said on Friday.

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 city of Cienfuegos.

At the nearby Bay of Pigs, buses evacuated residents after
they secured their homes, taped up windows and collected
valuable possessions.

Panicky inhabitants of Havana, the capital of 2.3 million,
lined up at gasoline stations and bakeries to stock up with
fuel and bread. Authorities suspended all school classes in
Cuba and evacuated 200,000 people from coastal areas, including
hundreds of tourists on holiday on outlying islands.

The hurricane was expected to barrel through Cuba and out
into the Florida Straits anywhere between Havana and the beach
resort of Varadero, Cuban forecasters said.

KEYS THREATENED

As Dennis 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.

Dennis was expected to brush past the Keys early 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 early
2003.

The Naval Air Station at Key West ordered 8,700 military
personnel and their families to evacuate the lower Florida Keys
and designated Orlando as a safe haven for them. Only
designated emergency and security people will remain at the air
station and military facilities, a Navy statement said.

Moving over shallow and warm waters off southern Cuba,
Dennis continued to gain strength after becoming a Category 4
storm late on Thursday on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. A
hurricane of that rating is capable of causing extreme damage.

HAITI HIT HARD

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), the center of Dennis was 130
miles west of Camaguey, Cuba, and was again moving at 15 mph
(24 kph) on its northwest track, the hurricane center said.

Some weakening is forecast as the storm moves over Cuba,
but Dennis is expected to remain a major hurricane as it
emerges over the Straits and the southeastern Gulf on Friday
night, it said.

Heavy rain flooded parts of southern Haiti and forced
residents to flee their homes. A young man, identified as Gardy
Salomon, was killed when a tree fell on a house near the
southern city of Les Cayes, civil protection officials said.

Seven more Haitians 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. He said 26 houses were destroyed.

“We cannot confirm any dead for now in Grand-Goave,” he
said. “We have received reports that a number of people were on
the bridge when it collapsed but we don’t know whether they
managed to get out of the river or were actually killed.”

“No body has been recovered so far.”

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. (Additional reporting by Damian
Wroclavsky in Cuba, Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince, Jim
Loney in Miami, Michael Peltier in Tallahassee and Irene Klotz
at Cape Canaveral)