Hurricane heads for Mexico

Press, 15 September 1988, Page 6

Hurricane heads for Mexico

NZPA-AP Cancun, Mexico Hurricane Gilbert, one of the strongest in history, roared toward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula with 282 km/h winds today yesterday battering Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Cayman Islands. The hurricane killed at least five people in Dominican Republic on Sunday and six people died and 60,000 were left homeless in Jamaica on Monday, officials said. Communications were down in many storm-ravaged areas, and the death toll was expected to rise with arrival of damage and casualty reports. The hurricane, travelling westward across the Caribbean Sea, was yesterday upgraded to Category 5, the strongest type of hurricane, and Mexican officials expected the storm to hit them today.

Beachfront hotels were evacuated from Yucatan resorts of Cancun and Cozumel Island, Mexico news media reported. Oil companies took thousands of workers from rigs in Gulf of Mexico, according to reports from New Orleans. Gene Graves, marketing director for Petroleum Helicopters Inc in Lafayette, Louisiana, said his company’s 18 helipads were working at full capacity to evacuate about 10,600 oil rigs in the Gulf.

The National Weather Service said at 4 p.m. (New Zealand time) that Gilbert was centred about 241 km east-southeast of Cozumel and moving westnorthwest at 24 km/h with maximum sus-

tained winds of 280 km/ h. The Hurricane Centre said Gilbert was the most intense storm on record in terms of barometric pressure. By noon (New Zealand time) it was measured at 663.7 mm, the lowest pressure ever measured in the Americas breaking the 669.3 mm recorded for a 1935 hurricane that devastated the Florida Keys, the centre said. The Prime Minister, Edward Seaga, said the hurricane swept the full length of Jamaica “leaving a trail of wreckage behind it”. “It will take us some time before we can assess the full damage, but I have no doubt this is going to be the worst disaster we have experienced in our modern history,” he said. Herb Schoenbaum, a radio ham operator in Virgin Islands, said he spoke yesterday with Dave Porter, an American staying in Wyndham Hotel on Jamaica’s Montego Bay. “He said there is just nothing left. Boats on the beach were driven into cars like spears, power lines down, almost every tree in the area is on the ground,” he said. Mr Porter told him people who were trying to enter the hotel on their hands and knees at the height of the storm were swept into the ocean. The storm knocked out ail telephone service to Cayman Islands, a British dependency of 23,000 people. Warren Chase, an amateur radio operator in Fort Myers, Florida, said he received a report of a sailboat with seven people aboard missing near the Islands.