Wilma sweeps across Florida
Foreign Desk Report
NAPLES—Hurricane Wilma plowed into southwest Florida early Monday with
howling 125 mph winds and pounding waves, swamping Key West and knocking
out power to hundreds of thousands of people as it began a dash across
the state toward Miami and Fort Lauderdale. At least one death in
Florida was blamed on the storm.
The same storm that brought ruin over the weekend to resort towns along
Mexico’s Yucatan Coast came ashore in Florida as a strong Category 3
hurricane, but within 2 1/2 hours it had weakened into a Category 2 with
winds of 110 mph. By 9 a.m., the storm was centered in the middle of the
state about 45 miles southwest of West Palm Beach. It was moving
northeast at about 25 mph.
Gov. Jeb Bush said 4,000 utility workers were ready to repair the power
outages once the winds died down. Electricity was lost in the Keys,
Miami, Fort Lauderdale and even into central Florida. Nearly 33,100
Floridians hunkered down in dozens of shelters across the state’s
southern half.
“As the storm passes, our number one priority is saving lives and
restoring security,” Bush said in Tallahassee. “The Florida National
Guard is on the move, more than 3,000 soldiers and airmen are mobilized
and another 3,000 are on alert”.
“We have been huddled in the living room trying to stay away from the
windows. It got pretty violent there for a while,” said Eddie Kenny, 25,
who was at his parents’ home in Plantation near Fort Lauderdale with his
wife. “We have trees down all over the place and two fences have been
totally demolished, crushed, gone”.
In Cuba, huge waves crashed into Havana, swamping neighborhoods up to
four blocks inland with floodwaters reaching up to 3 feet in some
places. Basement apartments were submerged. In Cancun, Mexico, troops
and federal police moved in to control looting at stores and shopping
centers ripped open by the hurricane, and hunger and frustration mounted
among Mexicans and stranded tourists.
Wilma, Florida’s eighth hurricane in 15 months, made landfall in Florida
at 6:30 a.m. EDT near Cape Romano, 22 miles south of Naples, bringing
with it a potential 18-foot storm surge, the National Hurricane Center
said. Up to 10 inches of rain and tornadoes were forecast for parts of
central and southern Florida. “I looked out our place and I saw a bunch
of stuff flying by,” said Paul Tucchinio, who was riding out the storm
in a condo three blocks from the beach in Naples. “It sounds like
someone threw a bunch of rocks against the boards. It’s wicked”.
The storm flooded large sections of Key West and other areas and knocked
out power to more than 300,000 homes and businesses as it raced across
the state and began buffeting heavily populated Miami-Dade, Broward and
Palm Beach counties on the Atlantic coast. In Weston, near Fort
Lauderdale, Kim DuBois sat in her darkened house with her two children
and husband, with the power out and the storm shutters up. For light
they used a battery-powered pumpkin lantern they bought for Halloween.
“I could hear tiles coming off the roof,” she said. “There are trees on
cars and flooding at the end of our street.” She added: “Really what I’m
afraid of is tornadoes”.
A man in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs died when a tree
fell on him, Broward County spokesman Carl Fowler said. Wilma killed at
least three people in Mexico and 13 others in Jamaica and Haiti as it
made is way across the Caribbean last week.
But in the low-lying Florida Keys, not even 10 percent of the Keys’
78,000 residents evacuated, Sheriff Richard Roth said.
About 35 percent of Key West was flooded, including the airport, said
Jay Gewin, an assistant to the island city’s mayor. No travel was
possible in or out of the city, he said. U.S. 1, the only highway
connecting the Keys to the mainland, was flooded.
Key West Police Chief Bill Mauldin said the flooding was severe — “more
extensive than we’ve seen in the past.” But he said he would not know
until the full extent of any damage until the winds died down.
Flooding was reported a few islands to the north on the snowbird enclave
of Marco Island, and in downtown Naples. “But we really are only halfway
through the storm, so we can’t get out to assess things,” Collier County
emergency management spokeswoman Jaime Sarbaugh said.
By midafternoon, a weaker Wilma was expected to skirt the southern end
of Lake Okeechobee and head into the Atlantic off Palm Beach County. By
early Wednesday, it was expected to be off the coast of Canada, but
forecasters said it may not bring heavy rain because its projected track
was far off shore.
David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, said FEMA personnel were in shelters waiting for the hurricane
winds to die down before they could assess the damage and begin relief
efforts. He said he was “very concerned” that so many people in the Keys
did not evacuate.
While FEMA was bitterly criticized for its sluggish response to
Hurricane Katrina, this time the agency had people working side by side
with state emergency officials, Paulison said.
“We are going to make sure that we have good visibility on anything
that’s going on the ground to make sure we ... understand exactly what’s
happening,” he said on CBS.
FEMA personnel are “ready to go,” Paulison said on CNN. “They’re
motivated, they’re going to get on top of this and move very quickly”.
Weary forecasters also monitored Tropical Depression Alpha, which became
the record-breaking 22nd named storm of the 2005 Atlantic season. Alpha,
which drenched Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Sunday, was not
considered a threat to the United States.
Gov. Bush asked that Florida be granted a major disaster declaration for
14 counties. Many of the areas bracing for Wilma were hit by hurricanes
in the past two years. |
