Tourist haven braced for storm of the century as airports due to close
Near miss: a couple inspect the damage near Kingston, Jamaica, which narrowly escaped a direct hit from Hurricane Dean
Tuesday August 21 2007
The hotel zone in Cancun, the ritziest of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula resorts, was almost completely empty as tourism sector workers sought higher ground inland and tourists camped out at the airport hoping to catch a flight out before the airport is forced to close.
Havoc
Authorities in the resort, remembering the havoc caused by Hurricane Wilma as recently as 2005, enacted formal evacuation procedures, established storm shelters inland and laid on extra flights.
Several hundred tourists, many of them from the United States, slept on the floor of Cancun airport on Sunday night hoping for a flight -- any flight -- to get them out of the area.
"We just wanted to get out anywhere," one tourist, Florida Volynskaya of Baltimore, told the Associated Press. "We really didn't want to be in a shelter."
For now, Dean has been powerful but relatively merciful. Jamaica looked at one stage to be in the eye of the storm, but Dean ended up passing 23 miles off the island's south coast.
That was still close enough to uproot trees, flood roads and tear the roofs off many homes and businesses.
In the central parish of Clarendon, police became involved in a shoot-out with looters at a shopping centre, but nobody was hurt in the exchange. A prison complex in the south of the island lost its roof, but no prisoners escaped.
The road from Kingston, the Jamaican capital, to the island's main airport was transformed into an unnavigable mess of sand, boulders and downed power lines.
The same was true of many others roads. Electricity and telephone lines were knocked out in many parts. Miraculously, though, there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious injuries.
Had Dean scored a direct hit on Jamaica, the damage could have been enormous, not least because many residents -- alarmed by the island's sky-high crime rate -- were afraid to leave their houses for fear of what might happen to their possessions in their absence.
Shoot-out
The government set up more than 1,000 shelters in schools, churches and sports arenas, but only 47 of them ended up being occupied by anyone.
"Too much crime in Kingston. I'm not leaving my home," one suburban resident, Paul Lyn, told the 'Miami Herald'.
A curfew remained in effect across Jamaica until late last night.
The only casualties of Dean so far have been on islands affected only by its outer edges. Six people dotted across Haiti, the Dominican Republic, St Lucia and Dominica were reported killed and dozens more injured.
It may be that the most populated areas of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula might yet be spared the worst too.
The latest projections yesterday suggested Dean's eye would pass south of Cancun and the other major resorts.
When Wilma hit the peninsula in 2005, it shattered the glass windows of Cancun's high-rise luxury hotels and left the hotel zone in chaos, the streets strewn with glass, metal, marble and mud.
Wilma ended up causing $3bn in damage, the largest loss from a natural disaster in Mexico's history.
Mexico is not the only country in the region to issue a storm warning and take evasive action.
Everywhere from Belize to the south coast of Texas, where the storm might arrive on Wednesday, was on high alert.
Texas officials distributed sandbags to coastal residents and took the precaution of moving prison populations further inland.
Dean has also affected the timetable for the space shuttle Endeavour, which is now scheduled to re-enter the earth's atmosphere today, 24 hours earlier than originally planned to make sure the high winds do nothing to jeopardise the safety of the craft and its crew.
The astronauts had hurriedly completed a shortened spacewalk and were still cleaning up from it when the decision came down from mission managers.
