Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Waves two-stories high crashed on Jamaica's eastern shore Friday, flooding homes and washing away roads as Hurricane Ivan's ferocious winds and pounding rains began to lash the island and threatened a direct hit on its densely populated capital. The death toll elsewhere in the Caribbean rose to 37.
Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson declared a public emergency and pleaded with the half-million people considered in danger - about one in five islanders - to get to shelters. Many residents, however, refused to leave, fearing their homes would be robbed if abandoned.
Awed onlookers stood transfixed on the seaside Palisadoes Highway near Kingston's airport as 23-foot waves crashed to shore, thrusting rocks and dead tree branches more than 100 feet into the road.
Ivan, a Category 4 hurricane, out of a top scale of 5, packed winds of 145 mph and could strengthen before fully striking the 145-mile-long island Friday night, meteorologists said.
Cuba declared a hurricane watch for the entire island Friday.
Farther south, in areas already struck by Ivan, authorities discovered more bodies along Venezuela's flooded coast and in devastated Grenada, where the U.S. State Department was arranging for the evacuations of all Americans who wish to leave the island.
Ivan began the fourth major hurricane of the Atlantic Season on Sunday, and damaged dozens of homes in Barbados, St. Lucia and St. Vincent before devastating Grenada with a direct hit.
Coup inmates stay in prison as others fleeST. GEORGE'S, Grenada - Scores of inmates climbed out of Grenada's crumbling 17th century prison when howling winds tore away the roof and parts of the walls. But former Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard stayed put, along with 15 others convicted of killings in the 1983 palace coup that led the United States to invade.
"I'm only leaving here when my name is cleared and I get a court order," Coard told the Associated Press on Friday.
He and other former politicians and soldiers are awaiting appeals before the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal and Britain's Privy Council, saying their life sentences were improperly handed down after the coup.
The coup plotters said they rode out the storm Tuesday in the hallways of Richmond Hill Prison, trying to persuade other inmates not to escape.
"The wind had a thousand different voices - whistling, screaming, moaning, howling," said Dave Bartholomey, 48, a former party leader among the convicts.
The prison's corrugated tin roof peeled back and went flying, and concrete walls built in recent years crumbled atop the solid stone fortifications. Coard said some inmates balanced on a wooden beam to reach the broken wall after the storm passed.
About 150 of the prison's 325 inmates fled, said Wesley Beggs, the prison's acting superintendent. Many have returned after checking on families, though as many as 75 remain at large.