Hurricane Ike headed for Gulf of Mexico

After wreaking havoc on the Turks and Caicos during the weekend, Hurricane Ike was downgraded to a Category 3 storm as it headed to Cuba and charted a longer-term course into the Gulf of Mexico, bringing the region its second major storm in the last two weeks.

The storm’s winds dropped from 135 miles per hour to 120 on Sunday, according to the National Hurricane Center’s report at 5:00 pm Miami time. At that time Ike was 75 miles to the north-northeast of Guantanamo, in Cuba. The forecast calls for the storm to possibly strike Cuba on Sunday night, sweeping across the island nation and then emerging to the south of the Florida Keys by September 9.

Officials in Monroe County, Florida, urged the 80,000 residents of the Florida Keys to evacuate. Cuba is evacuating more than 500,000 residents from its northeast coast, according to an Agence France-Presse report.

“I haven’t evacuated in 15 years,” commented David Black, a clerk at Key West’s Heron House hotel. “It’s less trouble to just weather the hurricane; and if you go to Miami or Orlando, you can get hit by the storm you’re running from.”

President Bush declared a state of emergency in Florida on Sunday, authorizing the release of $5 million in aid and assistance from federal disaster officials, a White House statement noted.

The forecast shows Ike to enter the Gulf of Mexico, which I home to 25 percent of all U.S. oil production, by the middle of the coming week. Computer models are predicting the storm to head in a direction south of Louisiana, toward the Texas coast.

www.nhc.noaa.gov