Hurricane Wilma, the most powerful storm in history ever recorded in the Atlantic, now appears headed for Florida — the latest in a no-mercy year of angry snarls from Mother Nature. The New York Times reports:
Several forecasts have the Category 5 storm striking southwestern Florida sometime this weekend, but the hurricane is moving too slowly and too erratically to make a firm prediction, the director of the National Hurricane Center, Max Mayfield, said.
“This is one of those cases when we have a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” he said. “This is one of the more perplexing storms we’ve had to deal with this year.”
Mr. Mayfield said that the center was having difficulty with its forecasts because of what he described as the “wobbly” nature of the hurricane.
While most of the dozen computer models have Wilma turning toward Florida, one model projects the storm stalling in the Gulf of Mexico for as long as five days, where Mr. Mayfield said, “it will likely weaken.”
But ABC News reports that Wilma is already lashing out in Central America:
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras Oct 19, 2005 — The fringes of Hurricane Wilma lashed Caribbean nations on Wednesday, forcing schools to close and thousands to evacuate as it churned toward Mexico’s Cancun resort and Florida after killing at least 12 people and becoming the most intense storm ever to form in the Atlantic.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami warned that Wilma would be a “significant threat” to Florida by the weekend in a season that has already seen devastation from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Officials ordered tourists out of the Florida Keys.
“We had well over 1,000 lives lost in Katrina. If Wilma, you know, comes into the U.S., to the Florida coast as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, that potential for large loss of life is with us,” said hurricane center director Max Mayfield.
And foreigners in Mexico were bracing themselves, too, ABC also reports:
Tourists packed Cancun’s airport in hopes of catching flights out and MTV postponed its Video Music Awards Latin America ceremony, originally scheduled for Thursday at a seaside park south of the resort town.
And, Times Online reports, people were bracing themselves in the Florida Keys:
THEY were meant to be preparing for a party in the Florida Keys, with stilt-walkers, reggae bands and a generous flow of cocktails.
But Hurricane Wilma came closer yesterday, so the carnival costumes were packed away and tourists were given their marching orders as the vulnerable island chain was placed under an evacuation order after Wilma turned from a tropical storm into an “extremely dangerous� Category 5 hurricane.
The Goombay Festival, a street party marking the start of Key West’s ten-day Fantasy Fest gala — usually the biggest tourist draw of the year — was on hold and the sound of power drills filled the streets as hotels, shops and restaurants began boarding up.
A PERSONAL NOTE:
This morning I talked with my mother, who lives with my father in the winter on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Both are in their 80s and my father has some often-painful mobility problems.
“We’re scared,” she said, noting that a family that is friends with them “called and said they would not leave here without us. They have an SUV and they want us to go with them. They want to wait until Friday. They had trouble getting hotel reservations since so many people are leaving their homes.”
My parents live in a condo: “The manager of our building said that any handicapped people would be crazy if they stayed because there would be no one around to help them if something happened to them. They say the winds are 175 miles per hour…”
So I tried to make a joke: “175 miles per hour? Think what that’ll do to your hair.”
But she was thinking about leaving, and getting through the storm — and what happens when it’s all over.
“What about the bridge (to their city)? Will it still be here when we come back?”
UPDATE: Voice of America:
A record-breaking storm in the Caribbean Sea may strike Florida this weekend. Hurricane Wilma has strengthened faster than any other hurricane in recorded history and is headed for Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
Forecasters says Hurricane Wilma, now in the northwestern Caribbean Sea, is an extremely dangerous storm. For a brief period on Wednesday, it had the highest winds and lowest barometric pressure ever reported in an Atlantic Ocean hurricane.
Computer prediction models agree that Wilma will brush the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula before turning towards the northeast. But they disagree over whether Wilma will then linger over western Cuba or head towards south Florida and the Florida Keys.
—Wilma: The track, the intensity & what you should expect:
The bottom line is that Wilma will not be a category 5 hurricane when she makes it to Florida. We expect a category 3 hurricane, but with a much broader wind field than currently.
The current swath of hurricane force winds is only about 35 miles wide –a swath of hurricane force winds about 3 times that size is expected by the weekend.
–TO STAY UP TO DATE keep checking Michelle Malkin’s round up (EARLIER LINK ERROR HAS BEEN FIXED) since she updates constantly. A MUST-READ source on this story.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.