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KINGSTON: Hurricane Dean crept into the northwestern Caribbean Sea early Monday after unleashing its fury on Jamaica, prompting its government to declare a state of emergency.
The state of emergency will continue for a period of 30 days, but can be lifted any time during this period, according to an announcement made by the prime minister's office.
Under the decree, the security forces are given wider powers to deal with criminal elements.
The announcement came late Sunday, after the Jamaica Constabulary Force reported several looting incidents across the island.
The situation will be reviewed at an emergency meeting of the Jamaican cabinet Monday, said Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.
"We will be assisting what is happening," she told reporters.
The meeting, the prime minister said, will be to ensure "that apart from all the things that have already been in place, I think we will now have to assess and move speedily to ensure we can get things back to normality."
As reports came in of blocked roads, downed power lines, ripped-off roofs and flooding, Miller hinted that the national elections set for August 27 may be delayed to deal with the hurricane damage.
The category four hurricane was whipping up giant surf and dumping inches of rain on the island. Roads were blocked by fallen trees and flooded in the eastern parts of the island, with power cuts affecting thousands of homes.
"The sea has dumped debris onto the roads," Portland parish Mayor Bobbie Montague said as the storm surged by Jamaica's southern coast, on course for the nearby Cayman Islands, Mexico and possibly Texas in coming days.
In Texas, Governor Rick Perry has ordered elderly people in the Rio Grande Valley region to be evacuated in case Dean's track takes it in a more northerly direction, which could put it over the southern tip of Texas by Thursday, CNN news reported.
At 0300 GMT, the centre of Dean was located 135 miles (215 kilometres) west-southwest of Kingston, and 195 miles (315 kilometres) southeast of the Caymans, moving west at about 20 miles (32 kilometres) an hour, said the US National Hurricane Centre.
With sustained winds of 145 miles (230 kilometres) an hour, Dean remained an "extremely dangerous category four hurricane," the centre pointed out, adding that the storm had the potential of becoming a deadly category five hurricane in the northwestern Caribbean Sea on Monday.
Jamaica's airports were shut since Saturday, and more than 4,500 people have packed into hundreds of shelters opened up by the government around the island amid bitter memories of Hurricane Ivan which killed 14 people in 2004.
Miller called on all off-duty police officers, fire fighters and prison warders to report for work, while electricity was turned off on the national grid as a safety measure.
The Jamaica Public Service Company said more than 135,000 customers were without power.
The prime minister called on all political parties to forget about national elections on August 27 and "put all differences aside as a national emergency is on us."
Mexico was, meanwhile, evacuating some 90,000 tourists from Cancun and other islands of the "Mayan Riviera," as well as some 13,000 workers on more than 140 of its oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, with Dean set to slam into the Yucatan peninsula late Monday.
In Cuba, just to the north of Jamaica, authorities had evacuated some 150,000 people from six eastern provinces to save them from possible flooding.
Hurricane Dean earlier brushed past Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, lashing it with heavy rain and gale-force winds. Two people were killed in Haiti's southeastern town of Moron and southern Tiburon, Haitian officials said, and more than 1,000 people evacuated from low-lying areas.
Two people were also killed in the French territory of Martinique, while authorities in the Dominican Republic, where a 16-year-old boy was killed when he was swept away by huge waves, warned of the danger of landslides.
The National Emergency Committee there also said that 1,580 people had been evacuated and some 316 houses had been damaged, many of them severely.
A leading risk modelling company, California-based Eqecat Inc., on Sunday estimated initial losses in the Lesser Antilles islands and Jamaica at between 1.5 billion and three billion US dollars. - AFP/ac
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