Gustav swells to dangerous Cat 4 storm off Cuba

Sanya · Aug 30, 2008

HAVANA - Gustav swelled into a fearsome Category 4 hurricane with winds of 145 mph on Saturday as Cuba raced to evacuate more than 240,000 people and Americans to the north clogged highways fleeing New Orleans.

Gustav already has killed 78 people in the Caribbean and the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said it could strengthen even more after hitting Cuba and entering the warm Gulf of Mexico on a projected course for the Katrina-battered U.S. coast.

Cuba grounded all national airline fights, though planes bound for international destinations were still taking off at Havana's Jose Marti International Airport. Authorities also canceled all buses and trains to and from the capital, as well as ferry and air service to the Isla de Juventud, the outlying Cuban island-province next in Gustav's path.

Heavy winds had already felled mango and almond trees and were shaking the roofs of buildings in the province, said Ofilia Hernandez, who answered a community telephone near downtown Nueva Gerona, Isla de la Juventud's largest city.

"Everyone's at home. It's getting very ugly," she said. "All night last night there was wind, but not like now. Now it's very strong. Things are starting to fall down."

The government's AIN news agency said officials were evacuating some 190,000 people from low-lying parts of tobacco-rich Pinar del Rio province on the western tip of Cuba's main island. AIN reported that 50,000 already had been evacuated further east.

Stiff winds whipped intermittent rains across Havana, where police officers in blue and orange rain coats supervised workers removing stones, tree branches and other debris from the storied beachfront Malecon, as angry waves crashed against the sea wall below.

Some shuttered stores had hand-scrawled "closed for evacuation" signs plastered to their doors. At others, small lines formed as residents stocked up on bread. Cars waiting to fill up their tanks stretched into the street outside some gas stations.

"It's very big and we've got to get ready for what's coming," said Jesus Hernandez, a 60-year-old retiree who was using an electric drill to reinforce the roof of his rickety front porch.

The U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, was hundreds of miles to the east, out of the storm's path.

Gustav rolled over the Cayman Islands Friday with fierce winds that tore down trees and power lines while destroying docks and tossing boats ashore on Little Cayman Island, but there was little major damage and no deaths were reported.

By midday Saturday, Gustav was about 185 miles east of the western tip of Cuba and just 55 miles east-southeast of the Isla de Juventud. It was expected to be moving northwest near 14 mph.

Hurricane force winds extended out 60 miles in some places.

Haiti's Interior Ministry on Saturday raised the hurricane death toll there to 66 from 59. Gustav also killed eight people in the Dominican Republic and four in Jamaica.

Gustav could strike the U.S. Gulf coast anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to Texas, but forecasters said there was an increasing chance that New Orleans will get slammed by at least tropical-storm-force winds, three years after devastating Hurricane Katrina.

People began pouring out of the city along the highways and the government announced plans for broader evacuations. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it expects a "huge number" of Gulf Coast residents will be told to leave the region this weekend.

As much as 80 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas production could be shut down as a precaution if Gustav enters as a major storm, weather research firm Planalytics predicted. Oil companies have already evacuated hundreds of workers from offshore platforms.

Retail gas prices rose Friday for the first time in 43 days as analysts warned that a direct hit on Gulf energy infrastructure could send pump prices hurtling toward $5 a gallon. Crude oil prices ended slightly lower in a volatile session as some traders feared supply disruptions and others bet the U.S. government will release supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Meanwhile, the hurricane center said Tropical Storm Hanna was projected to near the Turks and Caicos Islands late Sunday or on Monday, then curl through the Bahamas by early next week before possibly threatening Cuba.

It had sustained winds near 50 mph Saturday and the hurricane center warned that it could kick up dangerous rip currents along parts of the southeastern U.S. coast.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/tropical_weather
Click to expand...

First Katrina and now this one.... man, I would hate to live in New Orleans.

Laurence_Fox · Aug 30, 2008

It has the potential to be a category five by the time it makes landfall in New Orleans.

Katrina was a category five.

Yeah I'd hate to be there right now.

Cin · Aug 30, 2008

GUSTAV IS THE NAME OF THE CORPSE BRIGADE TRAITOR THAT KIDNAPPED THE MARQUIS ELMDOR DE LIMBERRY.

:'D Oh god I'm terrible.

Mirai · Aug 30, 2008

I really hope it doesn't hit SE Texas. But, I don't wish misfortune on New Orleans and my other Cajun brethren.

It's like one of those things where you wish something not to happen to you, but if it doesn't happen to you, it'll happen to someone else.

After college, I'm moving into a landlocked state.

What? · Aug 30, 2008

Thank god I live in Canada.

GhettoXemnas · Aug 30, 2008

Wow. God must hate N.O.
Well atleast Lil Wayne could end up with more **** to rap about.
Yes I know thats a horrible thing to say =/

Sanya · Aug 30, 2008

Laurence_Fox said: ↑

It has the potential to be a category five by the time it makes landfall in New Orleans.

Katrina was a category five.

Yeah I'd hate to be there right now.
Click to expand...

Yeah... but I thought Katrina was a category 5 in the Gulf but hit landfall as a 4?

Laurence_Fox · Aug 30, 2008

Roxasvsriku said: ↑

Yeah... but I thought Katrina was a category 5 in the Gulf but hit landfall as a 4?
Click to expand...

It could have been. All I know it was it was a Cat. 5 at some point.

Sora2940 · Aug 31, 2008

just saw on the news that Hurricane Gustav has been upgraded to a category 5 storm
feel sorry for all the peeps on New Orleans right now....

Sanya · Aug 31, 2008

Latest article.

New Orleans orders mandatory evacuation

NEW ORLEANS - Residents were ordered to flee an only partially rebuilt New Orleans Sunday as another monster storm bore down on Louisiana nearly three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina wiped out entire swaths of the city.

Hurricane Gustav, which already killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean, strengthened quickly into a Category 4 and was poised to become a Category 5 storm, packing winds in excess of 156 mph. It slammed Cuba's tobacco-growing western tip before moving away from the island country into the Gulf of Mexico.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin used stark language to urge residents to get out of the city, calling Gustav the "storm of the century."

"This is the real deal, not a test," Nagin said as he issued the evacuation order Saturday night. "For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life."

Forecasters were slightly less dire in their predictions, saying the storm should make landfall Monday afternoon somewhere between western Mississippi and East Texas, where evacuations were also under way. It's too early to know whether New Orleans will take another direct hit, they said, but city officials weren't taking any chances.

The mandatory evacuation of the city's west bank, where levee improvements remain incomplete, was to begin at 8 a.m., with the east bank to follow at noon. It's the first test of a revamped evacuation plan designed to eliminate the chaos, looting and death that followed Katrina.

The city will not offer emergency services to those who choose stay behind, Nagin said, and there will be no "last resort" shelter as there was during Katrina, when thousands suffered inside a squalid Superdome. The city said in a news release that those not on their property after the mandatory evacuation started would be subject to arrest.

Many residents didn't need to be ordered, with an estimated 1 million people fleeing the Gulf Coast on Saturday by bus, train, plane and car. They clogged roadways, emptied gas stations of fuel and jammed phone circuits.

At the city's main transit terminal, a line snaked through the parking lot for more than a mile as residents with no other means of getting out waited to board buses bound for shelters in north Louisiana and beyond.

"I'm not staying for 'em any more," said Lester Harris, a 53-year-old electrician waiting at a bus pickup point in the Lower 9th Ward. He was rescued from his house by boat after Katrina. "I got caught in the water and spent two days on my roof. No food, no water. It was pretty bad."

Mike Mayer, owner of Jefferson Indoor Range and Gun Outlet in suburban Metairie, said sales of guns and ammunition were up.

"My business doubled," he said. "People are afraid of coming back after the storm. ... They want some protection when they walk back in."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff planned to travel to Louisiana on Sunday to observe preparations. And likely GOP presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, were traveling to Mississippi.

Despite the stern warnings from Nagin and others, the expected arrival of 2,000 National Guard troops suggested officials were expecting stragglers.

Stephen Sonnier left for Katrina, but not this time.

"I'll never leave again. Just being away, worrying about it last time? I'd have rather been here," Sonnier said as he helped his friend Bill Espy use an electric drill to fasten metal hurricane panels over the window of his reconstructed flower shop.

Sonnier had just marked the third anniversary of Katrina on Friday by placing flowers on a makeshift memorial to a woman named Vera who was struck by a car after the storm. Her body lay unattended for days before neighbors built a makeshift brick tomb around her. Pictures of that grave with its spray-painted epitaph: "Here lies Vera, God Help Us!" became one of the symbols of the post-Katrina mayhem.

Many residents said the early stage of the evacuation was more orderly than Katrina, although a plan to electronically log and track evacuees with a bar code system failed and was aborted to keep the buses moving. Officials said information on evacuees would be taken when they reached their destinations.

Some began arriving Saturday in Arkansas, where the National Guard prepared to shelter thousands for weeks. At least 15,000 people sought refuge in the inland state in 2005, following Katrina and Rita.

Meanwhile, as many as 500 critical-care patients were being airlifted from hospitals along the Gulf Coast to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a spokesman said. The patients were being taken to about 20 hospitals around North Texas.

Traffic late Saturday night was stop and go on Interstate 10, heading west into Houston from the Louisiana border, as Texas prepared to house up to 45,000 evacuees, even though that state's eastern stretches were within the range of where Gustav could make landfall.

In Beaumont, not far from where Hurricane Rita roared ashore as a Category 3 in 2005, residents were boarding up homes and leaving. In neighboring Orange County, officials were inundated "by thousands" of people calling to register for evacuation assistance, a county spokeswoman said.

To the east, Louisiana residents were checking into hotels along Alabama's coast. Mitch and Laura Tucker of Mandeville brought along their dog, Roux, whom they saved during Katrina.

"We don't know what we'll be going back to," he said.
Click to expand...

Same source as the other article. If New Orleans gets destroyed again, I wonder if they will even bother rebuilding it.

Log in or Sign up

Gustav swells to dangerous Cat 4 storm off Cuba

Sanya Orussia’s 586th Fighter Regiment

Premium

Laurence_Fox Chaser

Premium

Cin Derp Derp Derp Derp Derp Derp Derp Derp Derp Derp

Premium

Mirai King's Apprentice

What? 『 music is freedom 』

Premium

GhettoXemnas literally dead inside

Premium

Sanya Orussia’s 586th Fighter Regiment

Premium

Laurence_Fox Chaser

Premium

Sora2940 Moogle Assistant

Sanya Orussia’s 586th Fighter Regiment

Premium