HAVANA — Hurricane Ike roared down Cuba’s spine Monday and toward the island’s densely populated capital of fragile historic buildings after ravaging homes, forcing 1.2 million people to evacuate and killing at least four. U.S. residents from Florida to Texas braced for Ike’s next wallop.
Ike, which raked the Bahamas and worsened floods in Haiti that have killed at least 312 people, made landfall on eastern Cuba as a terrifying Category 3 hurricane, then weakened Monday as it ran along the length of the Caribbean’s largest island.
It was a Category 1 storm Monday afternoon, but forecasters expected it to strengthen again before hitting Louisiana or Texas this weekend.
“This critter was angry, really angry,” Delia Oliveras, 64, said in the central city of Camaguey. Winds tore the roof from the living room where her family was huddled, and they fled to a covered patio. “We have seen hurricanes, but never as big as this.”
State television reported that Ike killed four people in Cuba — the first storm deaths on the island in the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season.
Cuba, which has carried out well-executed evacuations over the years, ordered 1.2 million people to seek safety with friends and relatives or at government shelters, state television reported. In Havana, where the hurricane was expected to unleash heavy winds and rain by this morning, evacuations began in earnest late Monday afternoon.
More than 1,000 homes were damaged, including 300 destroyed, when Ike first made landfall in Cuba in the easternmost coastal city of Baracoa, said Luis Torres, president of the Civil Defense Council in Guantanamo province.
Falling utility poles crushed cars parked along narrow streets in Camaguey and the roaring wind transformed buildings of stone and brick into piles of rubble. Colonial columns were toppled and the ornate sculptures on the roofs of centuries-old buildings were smashed in the city, a UNESCO world heritage site.
The U.S. Hurricane Center said on its present track, Ike should cross western Cuba during the day today, before moving into the Gulf of Mexico in the evening.
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