NASSAU, Bahamas — Ike roared across low-lying islands today as a Category 3 hurricane, destroying homes, sweeping away boats and bringing more rain to waterlogged communities in Haiti, where at least 48 people died in the floods.
Slamming into the southern Bahamas, Ike bore down on Cuba on a path that could hit Havana head-on, and hundreds of thousands evacuated to shelters or higher ground. To the north, residents of the Florida Keys fled up a narrow highway, fearful that the “extremely dangerous” hurricane could hit them Tuesday.
At least 48 people died as Ike’s winds and rain swept Haiti, and a Dominican man was crushed by a falling tree. It was too early to know of deaths on other islands where the most powerful winds were still blowing.
The center of the hurricane hit the Bahamas’ Great Inagua island, where screaming winds threatened to peel plywood from the windows of a church sheltering about 50 people, shelter manager Janice McKinney said.
“Oh my God, I can’t describe it,” McKinney said, adding that the pastor led everyone in prayer while the winds howled.
A Category 4 storm earlier in the day, Ike weakened slightly to a Category 3 hurricane as it bore down on Cuba, still about 75 miles from Guantanamo Bay and moving west at 14 mph. Its eye was west of Great Inagua Island in the southeastern Bahamas, with maximum sustained winds near 120 mph.
“All we can do is hunker down and pray,” reserve police officer Henry Nixon said from a shelter on Great Inagua where about 85 people huddled around a radio.
Great Inagua, closer to Haiti than to the Bahamian capital of Nassau, is the southernmost island in the Bahamas archipelago. It has tens of thousands of pink West Indian flamingos — the world’s largest breeding colony — and about 1,000 people. Both populations took shelter — the pink flamingos gathered under mangrove trees ahead of the storm.
“They know what to do. They always find the sheltered areas,” Nixon said as Ike blew shingles off rooftops.
Rain drove in horizontal sheets and wind tore through roofs across the Turks and Caicos, which has little natural protection from an expected storm surge of up to 18 feet.
The British territory’s Premier Michael Misick said more than 80 percent of the homes were damaged on two islands and people who didn’t take refuge in shelters were cowering in closets and under stairwells, “just holding on for life.”
“They got hit really, really bad,” Misick said. “A lot of people have lost their houses, and we will have to see what we can do to accommodate them.”
In South Caicos, a fishing-dependent island of 1,500 people, most homes were damaged, the airport was under water, power will be out for weeks, and every single boat was swept away despite being towed ashore for safety, Minister of Natural Resorces Piper Hanchell said.
Tourism chairman Wayne Garland was text-messaging with two people in Grand Turk during the height of the storm. “They were literally in their bathroom because their roofs were gone,” he said. “Eventually they were rescued.”
In Providenciales, there was flooding, roof damage and downed power lines but no injuries, he said.
Many more Haitian lives were threatened as Ike’s downpours topped flooding from Hanna, Gustav and Fay. Officials said they would have to open an overflowing dam, inundating more homes and possibly causing lasting damage to key farming areas. The latest deaths raised Haiti’s death toll to 306 from the storms in recent weeks.
Ike’s pelting rains couldn’t have come at a worse time for Haiti. The Mirebalais bridge collapsed in the floods, cutting off the last land route into Gonaives, Agriculture Minister Joanas Gay told state-run Radio Nationale. Half the homes in Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth-largest city, were already under water.
Heavy rains also pelted the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, where about 4,000 people were evacuated from northern coastal towns. One man was crushed by a falling tree.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center projected Ike’s eye would strike Cuba’s northern coast tonight and possibly hit Havana, the capital of 2 million people with many vulnerable old buildings, by Monday night.
At the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in southeast Cuba, all ferries were secured and beaches were off limits. The military said cells containing the detainees — about 255 men suspected of links to the Taliban and al-Qaida — are hurricane-proof.
“People have been forewarned for a day,” Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Robert Lamb said. “It’s starting to get breezy.”
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