Thursday August 28, 2008
Storm Gustav kills 22 in Caribbean, heads for Gulf
By Joseph Guyler Delva

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Gustav drifted away from Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Wednesday after killing 22 people and was set to become a dangerously powerful hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico oil fields.
A woman crosses a street during rains caused by tropical storm Gustav in Port-au-Prince August 26, 2008. (REUTERS/Evens Felix)

Oil prices rose as Gustav appeared likely to be the first serious storm in three years to threaten U.S. energy facilities in the Gulf, home to a quarter of U.S. oil production and 15 percent of its natural gas production.

While the storm's eventual U.S. landfall could be anywhere from the Florida panhandle to Texas, Gustav's most likely track is directly toward New Orleans, the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Gustav was projected to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast around Monday, two days after the third anniversary of Katrina, which killed 1,500 people and caused at least $80 billion in damage in several states.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal put New Orleans residents on alert, saying evacuations could begin as early as Friday. Energy companies began ferrying workers from offshore oil rigs.

The seventh storm of what experts have predicted will be an unusually busy Atlantic hurricane season lingered for a day near Haiti, an ominous development for the impoverished nation of 9 million people where hillsides have been stripped of trees and heavy rains frequently cause disastrous mudslides.

Gustav's torrential rains triggered floods and mudslides that killed at least eight people in the Dominican Republic and 14 in neighboring Haiti, officials said.

Among the dead in Haiti were at least three people killed in a mudslide, a woman who died trying to cross a river and another person hit by a falling tree, officials said.

In the Dominican Republic, seven people from the same family were buried under mud when a hillside collapsed just north of Santo Domingo.

Gustav swirled 140 miles west of Haiti's teeming capital, Port-au-Prince, at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

It was moving to the west at 5 mph on a path that would allow it to regain strength over deep warm waters south of Cuba and take it into the Gulf of Mexico as potentially the first major hurricane to threaten U.S. energy installations there since Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Major hurricanes are those that rank from Category 3 upward on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of intensity.

"There is a strong probability that it will be a Category 3 storm by the time it enters the Gulf, and it has the potential to strengthen into a Category 4 or 5 storm over the Gulf," said John Kocet, a meteorologist with forecaster AccuWeather.

Katrina and Rita were Category 5 storms in the Gulf when they cut off about a quarter of U.S. oil and gas production by damaging offshore platforms and severing pipelines.

Gustav could shut down 85 percent of U.S. production platforms in the Gulf, private forecaster Planalytics said.

POUNDING RAIN

Gustav was expected to dump up to 12 inches of rain over Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and over eastern Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. In some places, the rainfall could reach 25 inches, the hurricane center said.

That could be devastating for Haiti. Parts of the south were already saturated after the passage last week of Tropical Storm Fay, which may have killed more than 50 people.

In 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne was blamed for flooding that killed around 3,000 Haitians.

Gustav's top sustained winds dropped to 60 mph as it struggled over Haiti's rugged mountains, below the 74 mph threshold for hurricanes.

Computer models indicated Gustav would probably steer between Cuba and Jamaica, pass near the wealthy Cayman Islands and then Cuba's westernmost tip.

Officials evacuated around 50,000 people from flood-prone areas in eastern Cuba, according to state TV.

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro praised his country's ability to cope with storms and criticized the United States.

"Fortunately we have a Revolution! It's guaranteed that nobody will be forgotten," he wrote in an Internet column. "If lives are lost, it won't be hundreds or thousands."

(Additional reporting by Bruce Nichols in Houston, Robert Gibbons and Richard Valdmanis in New York, Jeff Franks in Havana)

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