Hurricane Ike roars toward Cuba, Fla.

Thousands flee storm path; at least 48 more die in Haiti

Associated Press

September 8, 2008

CAMAGUEY, Cuba - Hurricane Ike bore down on Cuba after roaring across low-lying islands yesterday, tearing apart houses, wiping out crops and worsening floods in Haiti that have already killed more than 300 people.

With Ike forecast to sweep across Cuba and possibly hit Havana head-on, hundreds of thousands of Cubans moved to shelters or higher ground. To the north, residents of the Florida Keys fled up a narrow highway, fearful that the "extremely dangerous" hurricane could hit them tomorrow.

At least 48 people died as Ike's winds and rain swept Haiti yesterday, raising the nation's death toll from four tropical storms in less than a month to 306. A Dominican man was crushed by a falling tree. It was too early to know of deaths on other islands where the most powerful winds were still blowing.

Ike's center hit the Bahamas' Great Inagua island, where the roofs of its two shelters both sprang leaks under the 135-mph winds. As the storm passed, people inside peeked through windows at toppled trees and houses stripped of their roofs.

"It's nasty. I can't remember getting hit like this," reserve police officer Henry Nixon said from inside a shelter holding about 85 people.

At 8 p.m., Ike had weakened slightly to a Category 3 hurricane with top winds of 120 mph. It was about 30 miles off Cuba's northern coast, moving westward at 14 mph.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted Ike's eye would make landfall early today and could hit Havana, the capital of 2 million people with many vulnerable old buildings, by tonight.

An informal tally of figures being released sporadically by individual provinces indicated that more than 600,000 people had been evacuated in eastern Cuba by yesterday evening. Cuba's government said more than 224,000 people were being evacuated in the central-eastern province of Camaguey alone.

The first islands to bear Ike's fury yesterday were the Turks and Caicos, which have little natural protection from storm surges of up to 18 feet.

The British territory's Premier Michael Misick said more than 80 percent of the homes were damaged on two of the islands and people who didn't take refuge in shelters were cowering in closets and under stairwells, "just holding on for life."

In South Caicos, a fishing-dependent island of 1,500 people, most homes were damaged, the airport was under water, power will be out for weeks and at least 20 boats were swept away despite being towed ashore for safety, Minister of Natural Resources Piper Hanchell said.

Tourism chairman Wayne Garland was text-messaging with two people in Grand Turk during the height of the storm. "They were literally in their bathroom because their roofs were gone," he said. "Eventually they were rescued."

The bodies of 21 of the Haitian victims, still unclaimed, were stacked in a mud-caked pile in a funeral home in the coastal Haitian town of Cabaret - including two pregnant women, one with a dead girl still in her arms. More than a dozen children were in the pile. The rest of the known deaths were all in the Cabaret area, civil protection director Marie-Alta Jean Baptiste said.

Heavy rains also pelted the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, where about 4,000 people were evacuated from northern coastal towns.

Where Ike goes after Cuba was hard to predict, leaving millions from Florida to Mexico worrying where it will strike.

"These storms have a mind of their own," Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said as tourists and then residents fled the Keys along a single, narrow highway.

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin prepared for the possibility of more havoc only days after an evacuation of more than 2 million people from Hurricane Gustav.

"Our citizens are weary and ... they have spent a lot of money evacuating," Nagin said. "It will be very difficult to move the kind of numbers out of this city that we moved during Gustav."