01/08/09, 02:05:35 UTC

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Tourists jam Caribbean airports

edmontonsun.com

Jamaicans headed inland and tourists fled the country as hurricane Dean headed for a direct hit on the island Sunday after a deadly and destructive march across the eastern Caribbean

Coastal Texas and Mexico began evacuations, with many Texans hoping to avoid the disastrous last-minute exodus that occurred before hurricane Rita in 2005.

Jamaica converted schools, churches and the indoor national sports arena into shelters and authorities urged people to take cover from a storm that could rake the country with winds of 235 km/h and dump up to half a metre of rain on the island.

“It’s going to be very, very serious,” said Lawrence Samuel as he shopped for emergency groceries while his wife and son went to the hardware store for plywood and other supplies.

Flights cancelled

At 11 a.m. EDT, the centre of the storm was about 210 kilometres east-southeast of Kingston and expected to be very near Jamaica later in the day.

Air Canada spokesperson Angela Mah said Saturday that several flights to destinations in the hurricane’s path had been cancelled and the planes deployed to bring Canadians home.

Two aircraft were sent Saturday to Jamaica and flights were also heading to Cancun and Cozumel, while the company planned to send planes to Punta Cana and Grand Cayman on Sunday.

“The information that we’ve received is we are expecting our flights to be full,” Mah said.

A Canadian couple from Windsor, Ont., were among those who failed to get out before the airport in Montego Bay was closed.

Brett Belanger, 34, and his wife, Lara, 32, both Casino Windsor employees, were honeymooning in Jamaica after getting married Tuesday.

The couple said in an e-mail that they were nervous about riding out the storm in their room on the top floor of their hotel.

However, Brett Belanger’s mother, Sue Belanger, said Sunday the resort is brand new and officials were calling it “hurricane proof.”

Residents evacuate, tourists flee

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said the first hurricane of the Atlantic season was projected to reach the most dangerous hurricane classification, Category 5, with winds of near 260 km/h before crashing into the Mexican coastline near Cancun on Monday night or Tuesday. The Mexican mainland or Texas could be hit later.

Officials in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula issued a hurricane watch and Cuba issued a tropical storm warning and said it was evacuating 50,000 people from three central and eastern provinces.

The low-lying Cayman Islands were expected to take a direct hit Monday. Tourists there jammed Owens International Airport in snaking lines that stretched outside onto a lawn. A police officer with a bullhorn kept order.

In the Texas coastal city of Galveston, residents remembered the 2005 hurricane Rita evacuation, when motorists from the coast ran into residents fleeing Houston, clogging evacuation routes amid sweltering heat. State officials say they’ve worked out the kinks in the system, but many Galveston residents were skeptical.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people about this,” said Chuck Lee, a resident. “They’d rather die in their homes than die in their cars on some highway.”

'Make arrangements to leave now'

Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said late Saturday the country was confronting a national emergency and urged people in flood-prone areas to head for shelter.

“Do not wait for the last minute to make the decision to move from where you are,” Simpson Miller said. “Decide now and begin to make arrangements to leave now.”

Thousands of alarmed tourists were not waiting. They jammed Caribbean airports for flights out of hurricane Dean’s path as the fierce storm that has already claimed at least seven lives.

Jamaican officials closed the airports late Saturday ordered all businesses shuttered until Tuesday to prevent the looting that occurred during hurricane Ivan in 2004.

The first hurricane of the Atlantic season rolled through the Caribbean to the south of Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where heavy rain and surging seas caused flooding Saturday in coastal areas.

Thousands huddle in darkness

In Gonave, an island with no electricity west of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, thousands of people huddled in the darkness in churches and schools and other inland shelters as the storm brought heavy rain and fierce winds, said Samuel Menager, an employee of the international aid group World Vision who helped evacuate people from the coast.

No deaths or injuries were immediately reported in Haiti, although authorities are surveying damages in the island’s south, said Jean-Junior Joseph, former press secretary of the prime minister’s office.

The storm’s wrath could be felt Saturday in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, where a boy was pulled into the ocean and drowned while watching waves strike an oceanfront boulevard, the Dominican emergency operations centre reported.

Authorities in the eastern Caribbean were assessing the damage after Dean hit on Friday as a Category 2 storm with winds near 160 km/h.

 Printable Version  | published Aug 19, 2007