=?x-unknown?q?25627=3A__=28news=29=E0__Chamberlain=3A___Hur?==?x-unknown?q?ricane-Dennis_=28fwd=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By BEN FOX

   GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL STATION, Cuba, July 8 (AP) -- Packing devastating
145 mph winds, Hurricane Dennis tore down a lifeguard tower at the U.S.
detention camp for terror suspects as it stalked Cuba's south coast and
moved Friday toward the heart of the largest Caribbean island.
   Thousands of residents and tourists fled the Florida Keys, fearing
Dennis would skirt the island chain or hit it on its way to the Gulf of
Mexico, on a path that raised fears of further disruption to U.S. oil
operations.
   A Category 4 storm, Dennis killed five people, collapsed a bridge and
blocked roads with downed power lines and trees in Haiti and Jamaica on
Thursday.
   It strengthened Friday to 150 mph winds before weakening slightly to 145
mph. Its eye made landfall on central Cuba's southern coast a second time
shortly before 2 p.m. Friday near Cienfuegos, Cuba, about 125 miles
southeast of Havana, the Hurricane Center in Miami said.
   Hurricane-force winds extended 50 miles with tropical storm force winds
stretching another 160 miles. Dennis was moving northwest near 17 mph.
   The U.S. detention camp on Cuba's extreme southeast end that holds some
520 terror suspects was spared overnight.
   Heaving surf tore away a lifeguard tower at Windmill Beach and storm
force winds reaching 40 mph destroyed a bus shelter. A few power lines and
tree branches were knocked down and there was minor flooding.
   "Actually, everybody fared real well," said Navy Cmdr. Anne Reese.
   On Thursday, troops watched from a cliff as the churning Atlantic Ocean
threw up massive waves of salt spray that towered over the razor wire fence
surrounding the camp at Guantanamo Bay.
   The troops fixed metal shutters over the steel mesh windows of some
prison cells overlooking the sea at Camp Delta, which is just 150 yards
from the ocean.
   The first hurricane of the season sideswiped Haiti and Jamaica on
Thursday, then overnight crossed a sparsely populated Cuba's Cabo Cruz,
which juts out far west of the island, Wallace said.
   Dennis was expected to strike again Friday night and cross central and
western Cuba, including Havana.
   Forecasters predict the storm will intensify and hit the United States
anywhere from Florida to Louisiana by Sunday or Monday. Even while it was
in the Caribbean, it already disrupted oil production in the Gulf of
Mexico, the fourth storm to do so in four weeks.
   The Florida Keys were on hurricane warning and the rest of the peninsula
on tropical storm watch.
   Thunderstorms swept over the Dominican Republic, southern Haiti and
northeast Jamaica on Thursday.
   On Friday, the Cayman Islands downgraded its hurricane warning to a
tropical storm watch, spared from a direct hit by the storm's overnight
turn to the west.
   Hurricane Center forecasters warned Cuba's southeast Sierra Maestra
Mountains could get up to 15 inches of rain, with about 10 inches falling
on Jamaica's coffee-producing Blue Mountains.
   In the southwest Haitian town of Grand Goave, an Associated Press
Television News reporter saw at least four people die when a wood and metal
bridge collapsed.
   Witnesses said the river suddenly came rushing over the bridge. That cut
off Haiti's southwest peninsula from the rest of the country.
   Elsewhere on the dangerously deforested island, wind gusts uprooted a
palm tree and flung it into a mud hut, killing a fifth person in the
southern town of Les Cayes, the Red Cross said.
   Floodwaters rose to waist level in an abandoned church in Les Cayes and
nearly reached a table where 63-year-old Eloge Larame lay down, ill. His
family of five stood on chairs, their feet still in water.
   Wind gusts ripped tin roofs from homes and whipped sheets of rain that
flooded roads.
   In Jamaica, floods and debris blocked the road leading from the capital,
Kingston, to the storm-battered east.
   A man there narrowly escaped from a car swept away by fast-flowing
floodwater on Wednesday night, a day before the hurricane passed.
   Cuba evacuated more than 100,000 people from the southeast on Thursday,
civil defense officials said on state television. Hundreds of tourists were
taken to hotels in Havana and northern Varadero beach resort.
   Thousands of students at government boarding schools were being sent
home, and livestock was moved to higher ground.
   The largest and most populous Caribbean island with 11.2 million people,
Cuba suffers few hurricane casualties because the government cautiously
evacuates people en masse, sometimes forcefully.
   Dennis came right behind Tropical Storm Cindy, which made landfall late
Tuesday in Louisiana and hindered oil production and refining. On Thursday,
remnants of Cindy dumped heavy rain on parts of the Carolinas, prompting
flash flood and tornado watches.
   The hurricane center's lead forecaster, Martin Nelson, said it was the
first time the Atlantic hurricane season had four named storms this early
since record-keeping began in 1851. The season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
   Last year, three catastrophic hurricanes -- Frances, Ivan and Jeanne --
tore through the Caribbean with a collective ferocity not seen in years,
causing hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.
   ------
   Associated Press writers Stevenson Jacobs in Morant Bay, Jamaica,
Leonardo Aldridge in Les Cayes, Haiti, and Anita Snow in Havana contributed
to this report.