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Wilma Does Cancun
EFL: CANCUN, Mexico -- Hurricane Wilma struck the Yucatan Peninsula today, pounding the evacuated beach resorts of Cancun and Cozumel, and dozens of fishing hamlets with 145-mph winds. Meanwhile in Florida, officials and residents began getting ready for the storm's potentially destructive arrival this weekend or early next week. "We do have a still extremely powerful Category 4 hurricane," said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield during a news conference this morning. "It's extremely dangerous. The eye wall is going over the Cozumel and Cancun area as we speak. They are getting the worst of it right now."The slow-moving hurricane is expected to cut a swath across the Yucatan Peninsula for 24 hours, with a forecasted 7 to 10 foot storm surge, before moving northeast into the Gulf of Mexico and into South Florida. An estimated 30,000 tourists remained in shelters and hotels in and around Cancun, but most of the city's 500,000 residents had been evacuated as the leading edge of the storm downed trees and flooded streets. Hundreds of residents and some 1,000 tourists were riding out the hurricane in shelters on the island of Cozumel, where the eye of the storm struck this morning, according to wire services. The hurricane remained a meteorological enigma, its future intensity and course â and the risk it posed to Florida â difficult to predict. Much, said weather experts, was riding on what happened over the next 48 hours. "A lot depends on how long Wilma spends over the Yucatan today, tomorrow and Saturday morning," Ben Nelson, Florida's state meteorologist, said Thursday. "Whenever you have a storm sitting over land, it's going to decrease in intensity." Nelson said he and many other Floridians would spend "an agonizing weekend" monitoring Wilma. As of Thursday, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were predicting Wilma might reach Florida's western shoreline late Sunday or early Monday, anywhere from the northern Gulf Coast to the Florida Keys. "There are all kinds of possibilities -- not many of them good," said Greg Artman, an emergency operations official in the Keys. National Hurricane Center forecasters said the hurricane should veer Saturday toward the northeast and pick up speed as a low-pressure trough forming over the central United States starts to influence its track. It could reach Florida as anywhere from a Category 1 to Category 3 hurricane, with a tremendous difference in its capacity to inflict damage, they said. "In terms of preparations, I'd prepare for the worse-case scenario," said Lt. Dave Roberts, a Navy forecaster at the center, in Miami. Posted by: Steve 2005-10-21 |
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