Jamaica hunkers down for Gustav
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — Jamaican authorities prepared for Tropical Storm Gustav’s expected arrival Thursday evening as U.S. forecasters predicted it could soon regain hurricane strength.
Jamaica’s government evacuated people from surrounding islands and prepared to move residents out of low-lying areas ahead of the storm, a military spokesman said.
Meanwhile, oil companies began to pull workers off drill rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and authorities in the Southeastern United States took steps to prepare for what forecasters warned could be a major storm early next week.
As Gustav crawled across the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Hanna formed out of a tropical depression northeast of Puerto Rico on Thursday, making it the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.
Shortly before 2 p.m. ET, Gustav was centered about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of the Jamaican capital, Kingston, the National Hurricane Center in Miami reported. The storm had top winds of 70 mph (112 kph), just below the 74-mph (119 kph) threshold of a minimal hurricane. See Gustav’s projected path
In Kingston, the island’s government posted a hurricane warning and opened shelters for those in low-lying areas. Maj. Mahatma Williams, the operations officer for the country’s military, said forecasters expect the storm to hit about 9 p.m. Local governments were ordering some people out of low-lying areas.
At the Pegasus Hotel, in the capital’s inland New Kingston district, general manager Eldon Bremner said his staff has activated an emergency plan to take care of both tourists and locals who may take shelter there.
The Pegasus traditionally is always a safe haven, he said. We get quite a lot of check-ins prior to hurricanes and also immediately after a hurricane, because we do pretty well during a hurricane.
Gustav has been blamed for 22 deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic after it made landfall Tuesday on the island of Hispaniola. Watch flooded streets and damage in Haiti
In the Dominican Republic, eight people were killed by a mudslide triggered by heavy rain in Santo Domingo, authorities said.
The dead included two women in their 30s and six children ages 2 to 15, according to government figures.
Marino Vasquez stood crying over the coffin of one of his children. I don’t have anybody anymore, he said. I lost my entire family. They’re all dead there. I have seven dead there. iReport.com: Storm takes young lives in Santo Domingo
Gustav lost strength in the Hispaniola strike, falling back to tropical-storm status, but the hurricane center predicted it would regain strength and become a hurricane again sometime Thursday.
The storm is expected to produce rainfall amounts of 2 to 4 inches over southern Cuba and 6 to 12 inches over Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, with isolated maximum amounts of up to 25 inches possible, forecasters said. The heavy rain could trigger flash floods and additional mudslides.
Gustav is expected to reach the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 3 hurricane sometime Sunday or Monday, triggering alerts across the U.S. Southeast.
In Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina struck three years ago, about 3,000 National Guard members began reporting for duty to prepare for the storm. About 1,500 of the activated troops likely will be assigned to provide security across the state’s coastal parishes if the storm hits there, said Maj. Michael Kazmierza, a National Guard spokesman.
Katrina killed more than 1,800 people when it struck on August 29, 2005, scouring Mississippi beach towns down to bare sand and rupturing the protective levees around New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Bush administration’s response to the storm was widely criticized, but David Paulison, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that FEMA is not even the same organization it was three years ago.
Certainly, Louisiana stands a fair likelihood of experiencing the first serious hurricane since the hurricanes of 2005, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters in Maryland before heading to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Not an occasion for panic, but an occasion to put into practice all the preparation that’s been done up until now. That’s what I’m here for, to make sure we’re doing it.
Authorities in Mississippi, Texas and Alabama also began activating storm plans and urging residents to keep an eye on the weather as Gustav moved across the Caribbean. iReport.com: How are you preparing? Share photos, video
Forecasters said it was too soon to know the storm’s path, but the National Hurricane Center’s projection models show Gustav heading toward Louisiana through the oil-rich region of the Gulf of Mexico by Sunday afternoon. Some oil companies began evacuating workers off their rigs Thursday, spokesmen said, while other firms said they were were monitoring the storm’s progress.
