Miami – As Hurricane Wilma slowly bore down on the Yucatan with the power to wreak havoc on one of Mexico’s top tourist destinations, far to the east, in Florida, officials and residents on Thursday began getting ready for the storm’s potentially destructive arrival in their state.
“Right now, we’re telling our folks to be prepared,” said Sherry Montgomery, a government spokeswoman in Charlotte County, home to 150,000 year-round residents on Florida’s southwestern coast.
Wilma, a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of near 150 mph, blew toward an expected landfall in the Yucatan peninsula late this morning. It remained something of a meteorological enigma as its future intensity and course – and the risk it posed for Florida – is difficult to predict.
“A lot depends on how long Wilma spends over the Yucatan, today, tomorrow and Saturday morning,” Ben Nelson, Florida’s state meteorologist, said Thursday. “Whenever you have a storm sitting over land, it’s going to decrease in intensity.”
Nelson said he and many other Floridians would spend “an agonizing weekend” monitoring Wilma’s progress.
As of Thursday, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were predicting Wilma might reach Florida late Sunday or early Monday anywhere along a broad swath of its western shoreline, from the northern Gulf Coast to the Florida Keys.
“There are all kinds of possibilities – not many of them good,” said Greg Artman, an emergency operations official in the Keys.
In Mexico, officials feared that if Wilma continued on its northwesterly tack, it could sweep along the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula. A direct hit there could be a “tremendous disaster,” said Jaime Albaran, a meteorologist and spokesman for Mexico’s national weather service. “This is a very, very powerful storm.”
As Wilma, whose forward motion slowed Thursday to 6 mph, got nearer, Cancun Mayor Francisco Alor announced the evacuation of the city’s hotel district.
