Hurricane alert issued for east coast

By Tom Brown

MIAMI (Reuters) – The threat Tropical Storm Ernesto posed
to Florida diminished on Tuesday as it failed to gain strength
over warm waters, but forecasters issued new hurricane alerts
for the U.S. east coast later in the week.

Ernesto, the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season’s fifth storm,
could regain hurricane strength after it emerges off northeast
Florida and curves back into land between Georgia and North
Carolina, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

But Ernesto appeared likely to bring mainly rain to Miami
and Fort Lauderdale, where residents formed long lines at gas
stations, emptied stores of batteries and filled sandbags on
the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“The threat of a hurricane is definitely diminishing,” said
the hurricane center’s director Max Mayfield, who became a
familiar face to Americans after Katrina flooded most of New
Orleans, killed about 1,500 people and caused $80 billion in
damage a year ago.

A state of emergency was in effect in Florida. Tourists
were ordered out of the low-lying Florida Keys as the first
rain squalls whipped ashore and law courts and schools were
closed. Some airlines canceled flights and ports were shut.

Authorities, while sounding words of caution about the need
for storm preparations, signaled that they were not expecting
much damage from Ernesto.

“This does not look like a catastrophic event but we always
want to be ready,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
said in Tallahassee after meeting Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The U.S. space agency NASA, which had initially canceled a
planned launch of the space shuttle Atlantis from its Florida
launch pad to bring the spaceship into shelter, reversed course
and began to roll the $2 billion ship back out.

At 5 p.m. (2100 GMT), Ernesto’s winds were still at 45 mph
(72 kph), hours after the storm left the mountains of Cuba,
where it had initially lost some intensity. Ernesto killed two
people in Haiti on Sunday after briefly becoming the season’s
first hurricane with winds of at least 74 mph (119 kph).

Tropical storms feed on warm waters, and the hurricane
center’s specialists said they were “slightly puzzled” that
Ernesto had not gained power in the Florida Straits.

KEYS RESIDENTS NERVOUS

The storm’s center was 105 miles east of Key West in the
Florida Keys island chain and about the same distance from
Miami. Ernesto was moving northwest at 13 mph (21 kph).

Along the Overseas Highway that connects the Florida Keys
to the mainland, residents parked their cars near bridges where
they would be above any storm surge.

“People are scared because of Wilma,” said Ada Martinez, a
Monroe County shelter manager at the Sugarloaf High School,
referring to last October’s hurricane that flooded 3,700 of the
15,000 homes in the town of Key West.

In Miami, long lines formed for a second day at gas
stations as residents filled their cars in anticipation of
widespread power outages, which would prevent most gasoline
stations from pumping gas.

After passing over much of the Florida peninsula, Ernesto
could reemerge over the Atlantic and make a second landfall in
South or North Carolina, becoming a hurricane again on the way,
the hurricane center said.

It issued a hurricane watch for coastal areas from north of
Altamaha Sound in Georgia to Cape Fear in North Carolina.