CANCUN (Mexico), Oct 23: Hurricane Wilma bore down on Florida on Sunday after devastating Mexico’s Caribbean resorts with flood water and wild winds that smashed thousands of homes and killed at least seven people.
Dazed tourists waded through knee-deep water in the streets of Cancun, one of the world’s top beach spots, to seek food and water after three nights in damp shelters without electricity.
“People are starting to get sick. Some of the elderly people are becoming ill. There is water but they are telling us to conserve it,” said American Doug Ruby, a computer security programmer.
Troops drove around handing out food packages but luxury beachfront hotels on a long spit of sand were cut off by water since Friday after the sea roared hundreds of yards (metres) inland.
Relentless howling winds and torrential rain ruined homes, hotels and stores all along the ‘Maya Riviera’, which pulls in millions of tourists with its white sand beaches, coral-filled seas and nearby Mayan ruins.
“It looks like a war zone out here,” said British tourist Thomas Hall as he glanced down a flooded avenue filled with collapsed electricity towers, fallen trees and debris.
Wilma, one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, crawled slowly across Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, before finally heading out into the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday on its way to southern Florida.
The storm lost some of its punch over land and its winds dropped to around 100 mph, making it a Category 2 hurricane on the five-stage Saffir-Simpson scale.
It was expected to pick up speed and power, swipe western Cuba and hit the fragile Florida Keys on Monday morning, bringing a storm surge of about 8-13 feet.
That would exceed the surge of Hurricane Charley last year, then the second costliest hurricane in US history with more than $15 billion in damage.
“This is a very big storm, giving us a larger storm surge over a greater area,” National Hurricane Center deputy director Ed Rappaport said on Sunday.
US space agency Nasa put its work force on alert and was expected to close its Kennedy Space Center in central Florida.
Rainfall from Wilma pounded Cuba’s tobacco-growing Pinar del Rio province and Havana on Sunday and the government evacuated half a million people from low-lying areas.
In Mexico, four people were killed on the island of Cozumel, a well-known scuba diving site, and another three on the mainland after days of pounding.
President Vicente Fox was due to fly to the area on Sunday.
In the Playa del Carmen resort, trees and concrete electricity poles lay all over the streets. Thatched roofs of hotels were torn to shreds and the roofs and windows were broken in most homes near the coast.
“Everything is destroyed. This was a hurricane that made history,” said Benigno Palma, a construction worker who rode out the storm in a hurricane shelter.
“We have money, but you can’t eat that,” said Limber de Jesus Orantes, another labourer who complained stores were closed and there was no food to buy.
Dozens of people took advantage of the chaos to loot stores, grabbing TVs, fridges and clothes. At one store, police beat the thieves with sticks and fired shots into the water to try to scatter them.
At 11am EDT, Wilma was about 285 miles southwest of Key West, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
Mudslides caused by Wilma killed 10 people in Haiti last week.
This hurricane season has spawned three of the fiercest storms on record. Experts say the Atlantic has entered a period of heightened storm activity that could last for 20 years.—Reuters
