Ike blasts Bahamas, aims at Cuba

The Associated Press

NASSAU, Bahamas — Ike roared across low-lying islands Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane, destroying homes, sweeping away boats and bringing more rain to waterlogged communities in Haiti, where at least 48 people died in the floods.

Slamming into the southern Bahamas, Ike bore down on Cuba on a path that could hit Havana head-on, and hundreds of thousands evacuated 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 Tuesday.

At least 48 people died as Ike’s winds and rain swept Haiti, and 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.

The center of the hurricane hit the Bahamas’ Great Inagua island, where screaming winds threatened to peel plywood from the windows of a church sheltering about 50 people, shelter manager Janice McKinney said.

At 5 p.m. EDT, Ike weakened slightly to a Category 3 hurricane as it bore down on Cuba, still about 75 miles from Guantanamo and moving west at 14 mph. Its eye was west of Great Inagua Island in the southeastern Bahamas, with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph.

Great Inagua, closer to Haiti than to the Bahamian capital of Nassau, is the southernmost island in the Bahamas archipelago. It has tens of thousands of pink West Indian flamingos — the world’s largest breeding colony — and about 1,000 people. Both populations took shelter — the pink flamingos gathered under mangrove trees ahead of the storm.

Rain drove in horizontal sheets and wind tore through roofs across the Turks and Caicos, which has little natural protection from an expected storm surge of up to 18 feet.

The British territory’s Premier Michael Misick said more than 80 percent of the homes were damaged on two 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 every single boat was swept away despite being towed ashore for safety, Minister of Natural Resorces Piper Hanchell said.

Twenty-one 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.

Many more Haitian lives were threatened as Ike’s downpours topped flooding from Hanna, Gustav and Fay. Officials said they would have to open an overflowing dam, inundating more homes and possibly causing lasting damage to key farming areas. The latest deaths raised Haiti’s death toll to 306 from the storms in recent weeks.

Ike’s pelting rains couldn’t have come at a worse time for Haiti. The Mirebalais bridge collapsed in the floods, cutting off the last land route into Gonaives, Agriculture Minister Joanas Gay told state-run Radio Nationale. Half the homes in Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth-largest city, were already under water.

Gay warned residents in the surrounding Artibonite valley to evacuate immediately because an overflowing dam would have to be opened, sending more water into the Gonaives floodplain. And in Gonaives itself, the waters were rising even as aid groups struggled to reach people with little or no access to food or water for days.

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. One man was crushed by a falling tree.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center projected Ike’s eye would strike Cuba’s northern coast Sunday night and possibly hit Havana, the capital of 2 million people with many vulnerable old buildings, by Monday night.

More than 224,000 people are expected to be evacuated before Ike hit in the central-eastern province of Camaguey alone, Cuba’s government said. Foreign tourists were pulled out from vulnerable beach resorts, workers rushed to protect coffee plants and other crops, and plans were under way to distribute food and cooking-oil to disaster areas.

At the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in southeast Cuba, all ferries were secured and beaches were off limits. The military said cells containing the detainees — about 255 men suspected of links to the Taliban and al-Qaida — are hurricane-proof.

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

Off Mexico’s Pacific coast, Tropical Storm Lowell was moving away from land.

For more information see Monday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.