Cancun, Mexico – Hurricane Wilma tore into Mexico’s resort-studded Caribbean coastline Friday with torrential rains and shrieking winds, filling streets with water, shattered glass and debris as thousands of tourists hunkered down in hotel ballrooms and emergency shelters.
The eye of the mammoth storm, which had already killed 13 people, moved over Cozumel island and was expected to pound the area for two days, raising the possibility of catastrophic damage, before curling around Cuba and sprinting toward Florida. Officials didn’t expect to be able to reach Cozumel until late Saturday, at the earliest, to assess damage.
With 140-mph sustained winds, the storm shattered windows and downed trees that crushed cars.
Pay phones jutted from floodwaters in the famed hotel zone.
As the eye of the storm approached Cancun, officials loaded more than 1,000 people into buses and vans and moved them to other shelters after a downtown cultural center suddenly became uninhabitable, Red Cross spokesman Ricardo Portugal said. It wasn’t immediately clear why the building had to be emptied.
At hotels being used as shelters, people pushed furniture up against windows that weren’t boarded up. Some had several inches of water in rooms and hallways as rain entered through broken windows. People at shelters slept under plastic sheeting.
Power was cut to most of the region before the storm as a precaution.
“Tin roofing is flying through the air everywhere. Palm trees are falling down. Signs are in the air, and cables are snapping,” Julio Torres told The Associated Press by telephone from the Red Cross office in Cozumel.
“Not even emergency vehicles have been able to go out on the streets because the winds are too strong.”
The center of the vast storm was projected to stay over Mexico’s Caribbean coastline until Sunday.
“It’s going to be a long couple of days here for the Yucatan Peninsula,” said Max Mayfield, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Mexican President Vicente Fox said he planned to travel to the affected region as soon as possible.
“Now is the time to save lives and protect the population, and we are working on that,” he said. “Afterward, we will begin the phase of helping citizens and reconstruction.”
At the same time, Wilma was pounding the western tip of Cuba, where the government evacuated nearly 370,000 people. Forecasters said Wilma could bring as much as 40 inches of rain in parts of Cuba.
Waves of up to 21 feet crashed on the extreme westernmost tip of Cuba, and heavy rains cut off several small communities. About 7,000 residents were evacuated from the coastal fishing village of La Coloma in Cuba’s southern Pinar del Rio province.
“We thought we’d be spending a lot less time here,” Maria Elena Torre said at a shelter set up inside a boarding school. “Now we have no idea how long we’ll be here.”
The slow-moving storm, inching along at 4 mph, was forecast to slam Monday into Florida, where emergency officials Friday issued the first evacuation orders for the mainland.
Residents of the Florida Keys were asked to start leaving two days ago.
Forecasters said the hurricane probably would weaken while over Mexico.
Officials said about 20,000 tourists were at shelters and hotels on the mainland south of Cancun, and an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 were in Cancun itself. Mexico’s civil defense chief, Carmen Segura, assured their relatives that “their families are protected, as they should be.” Instead of relaxing in luxury hotel suites overlooking a turquoise sea, many tourists found themselves sleeping on the floor of hotel ballrooms, schools and gymnasiums reeking of sweat because there was no power or air conditioning.
Wilma meant that Scott and Jamie Stout of Willisville, Ill., were spending their honeymoon on a Cancun basketball court with a leaky roof.
“After one more day of this, I believe people will start getting cranky. Things could get messy,” said Scott Stout, 26.
