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Hurricane Dennis kills 10 in Cuba, 22 in Haiti

Posted on: Friday, 8 July 2005, 21:02 CDT

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Hurricane Dennis roared through the Caribbean on Friday, leaving 10 dead in Cuba and 22 in Haiti before aiming for Havana on a course toward the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, where oil rigs and vulnerable coastal areas were evacuated.

The storm weakened slightly as it crossed Cuba but the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Dennis was expected to regain major hurricane status as it emerged over the Straits of Florida and the southeastern Gulf of Mexico.

Cuban President Fidel Castro said Dennis had already killed 10 people as its outer bands brushed over Cuba's southeastern corner Thursday night. Storm fatalities are rare in Communist Cuba where the authorities can muster all state resources to evacuate hundreds of thousands from the path of hurricanes.

Most of the victims died in collapsed houses in two coastal towns in Granma province, Castro said on state television. An 18-day-old baby was among those who died, he said, calling the hurricane a "diabolical force.."

Officials said 15,400 of the adjacent towns' 20,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Television images showed rows of clapboard houses flattened by the storm.

On Friday, gusts of up to 149-mph (240 kph) caused extensive damage in the city of Cienfuegos, where the storm made landfall. It ripped up trees and downed electricity lines, but no casualties were reported there, as Dennis moved on to threaten the capital Havana, where many live in decrepit colonial buildings.

The U.S. Hurricane Center said the eye of Dennis would head into the eastern Gulf on Friday evening and skirt the Florida Keys on Saturday before taking aim at the U.S. Gulf Coast.

It was the strongest Atlantic hurricane to form this early in the season since records began in 1851. Tourists and residents hurried to leave the fragile, low-lying Keys in long lines that became a familiar picture in 2004 when Florida was struck by four hurricanes in a row.

In southern Haiti, many people fled their flooded homes and the mayor of Grand-Goave, Marie Hingreed Nelchoix, said 17 people had died in and around her city, including 15 thrown into a swollen river when a bridge collapsed.

Four people died around the southeastern city of Jacmel, said a civil protection official. Earlier officials had reported that a young man was killed when a tree fell on a house near Les Cayes.

At 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT), Dennis was located about 45 miles east-southeast of Havana, and was moving northwestward at 14 mph (23 kph). Maximum sustained winds had decreased to near 115 mph (185 kph) with higher gusts. This makes Dennis a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

In the U.S. Gulf, a slew of energy companies said they were pulling workers off oil rigs and shutting down some crude and natural gas production.

Dennis was on a similar trajectory as last September's Hurricane Ivan, which caused extensive damage to pipelines and rigs. The U.S. Gulf provides about a quarter of U.S. oil and natural gas and the threat of Dennis has helped keep U.S. crude futures prices near record highs above $60 a barrel.

The storm was expected to regain some strength once it leaves the Cuban mainland and returns to open water, and U.S. forecasters said they expected it to still be a major hurricane, capable of causing serious damage, by the time it reaches the U.S. Gulf Coast on Sunday or early on Monday.

U.S. authorities ordered residents to evacuate Key West and the lower part of the Florida Keys, which are connected to the southern tip of mainland Florida by a single highway.

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, the first shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster in 2003.

(Additional reporting by Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince, Michael Christie and Jim Loney

in Miami, Michael Peltier in Tallahassee and Irene Klotz at Cape Canaveral)

Source: REUTERS

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