Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – Alarmed tourists jammed Caribbean airports for flights out of Hurricane Dean’s path Saturday as the monster storm began sweeping past the Dominican Republic and Haiti and threatened to engulf Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
In Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, a boy was pulled into the ocean and drowned while watching waves kicked up by the Category 4 storm strike an oceanfront boulevard, the emergency operations center reported. The waves also destroyed five houses and damaged 15 others along the Dominican coast, emergency officials said.
In Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, which stand directly in Dean’s path, fear gripped many islanders and tourists.
Bracing for the storm to hit today, Jamaica began evacuating people to more than 1,000 shelters nationwide. People jammed supermarkets and hardware stores in the capital of Kingston to stock up on canned food, bottled water, flashlights, batteries, lamps and plywood, while shop owners hammered wood over windows at malls in the city.
Resident Elaine Russell said she was getting ready for the storm, remembering Hurricane Ivan’s destruction in 2004.
“I can’t take it,” she said. “The storm is bad enough, but it’s what happens afterward – there’s no light, no water.”
Before dawn, tourists began lining up outside the Montego Bay airport in western Jamaica to book flights out. The storm was expected to bring 155 mph winds and as much as 20 inches of rain.
As of 11 p.m. Saturday, Dean was centered about 170 miles south-southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and 360 miles east-southeast of Kingston. It was moving west at 17 mph and had maximum sustained winds near 150 mph.
The storm was expected to clip Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and enter the Gulf of Mexico by Tuesday, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Forecasters said it was too soon to say whether Dean would strike the U.S.
