Tourists mob airports as Ivan nears Jamaica

Hurricane Ivan grew into the deadliest of storms today, packing winds of 160mph as it headed straight for Jamaica and left a devastated Grenada with 20 dead.

Foreigners began fleeing Jamaica and people were ordered to evacuate the Florida Keys.

Hundreds of tourists packed the airport of Montego Bay resort, trying to get off the island.

“Seeing other people panicked, I panicked as well,” said Blanca Surino, 21, who was trying to persuade frazzled airport personnel to put her on a flight to Los Angeles.

At the airport of Kingston, the capital, dozens of foreigners lined up for tickets.

“We were going to stick it out but the company I work for told everybody to evacuate,” said Dennis Hennessey, 39, a building contractor from Essex Junction, Vermont, who was helping build the new US Embassy in Kingston.

“They say Jamaica is a blessed place, and I hope it is,” he said.

Widespread looting erupted today in St George’s, Grenada’s capital, even as dazed survivors picked through debris and tried to salvage remnants left by the storm.

Caribbean troops were on the way to help restore order.

The most dangerous storm to hit the Caribbean in years killed at least 13 people in Grenada and damaged 90% of the 100,000 islanders’ homes, officials said.

From nearly 200 miles away, the hurricane killed four children on a beach in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic.

“The children were in front of the sea when it seems a gigantic wave dragged them into the Caribbean Sea,” said Jose Luis German, a spokesman for the National Emergency Commission.

Authorities there closed part of the seaside Malecon drive, where massive waves washed over the road.

In Jamaica, Prime Minister PJ Patterson urged his people to pray.

“We have to prepare for the worst case scenario. Let us pray for God’s care,” he said.

The storm is projected to pass directly over Jamaica tomorrow, then across Cuba and into the heart of the hurricane-weary southern United States.

Officials told tourists and residents to evacuate the Florida Keys because Ivan could hit the island chain by Sunday. It was the third evacuation ordered there in a month, following Hurricane Charley and hard on the heels of Hurricane Frances.

In St George’s, looters smashed shop windows and cleared out a huge dry goods warehouse filled with rice, sugar, flour, butter and soap.

Police Commissioner Roy Bedaau said that every Grenadian police station was damaged, hindering efforts to control looting.

Military officials in Barbados said 60 soldiers were on the way to Grenada - 30 from Barbados, 15 from St Kitts and 15 from Antigua.

Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said he was sending 17 police officers tomorrow, and would send more help once he was able to contact Grenada’s leader.

“We are terribly devastated … It’s beyond imagination,” Grenada’s Prime Minister Keith Mitchell told his people and the world from aboard a British Royal Navy vessel.

HMS Richmond and a British supply ship patrolling in the Caribbean rushed to Grenada yesterday to provide communications for Mr Mitchell and reunite him with his cabinet after his home was flattened.

Telephones and the national radio still were not operating today.

Royal Navy crews said today they have cleared the damaged and flooded airport runway and that emergency relief flights were starting to arrive.

The British sailors brought body bags ashore and also performed some emergency surgery.

“We were saving lives yesterday, with many of my sailors ashore doing a lot of good work with people who had suffered quite terribly,” Royal Navy Commander Mike McCartain said in an interview.

He said his ship anchored last night in the harbour at St George’s, half-choked by overturned boats with some thrown to land by battering waves.

Mr Mitchell confirmed that the island’s 17th century stone prison was “completely devastated” allowing convicts to escape, including politicians jailed for 20 years for killings in a 1983 left-wing palace coup that led the US to invade.

Grenada is known as a major world producer of nutmeg. Mitchell said most crops have been destroyed, including nutmeg.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said virtually every major building in St George’s, which boasted English Georgian and French provincial architecture, has suffered structural damage.

The UN is sending a disaster team, Mr Eckhard said in New York City. The Caribbean disaster response agency, based in Barbados, sent a team yesterday along with officials from USAID and the Pan American Health Organisation.

Because of poor communications, it was not possible to reach any of them.

The storm strengthened early today to become a Category Five, the strongest on the scale.

At 4pm Irish time Ivan was centred around 430 miles east-southeast of Kingston, Jamaica.

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 60 miles and tropical storm-force winds another 160 miles.

Ivan was moving west-northwest at 15 mph.

Its outer bands brought drenching rain to Haiti’s southwest peninsula overnight, where residents of sea-level Les Cayes town worried Ivan would bring disaster equal to May floods that killed 1,700 people and left 1,600 missing and presumed dead along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border.

It is the fiercest storm to hit the Caribbean since Hurricane Luis in 1995 and could be more destructive than Hurricane Gilbert, which was only Category Three when it devastated Jamaica in 1988.