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Cuba braces for the Category 4 hurricane's 160-mph gusts while Floridians evacuate the Keys.
By MIKE BRASSFIELD
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 4, 2001
Hurricane Michelle, a dangerous Category 4 storm with 160-mph wind gusts, is expected to pummel Cuba today and is keeping South Florida in suspense.
Forecasters think Michelle will probably turn east, away from Florida, and pass south of the Florida Keys on Monday. But the uncertainty in the forecast has people in Key West and Miami boarding up their windows.
In all likelihood, the Tampa Bay area will get only a few scattered showers.
Wherever it ends up, Michelle can wreak havoc with damaging winds and heavy flooding. The worst hurricanes to hit the United States in the past decade, Andrew and Hugo, were Category 4 storms.
Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency Saturday as the lower Florida Keys were evacuated.
Cuba, right in Michelle's path, is bracing for the worst today.
In Havana, 150,000 people have been told to evacuate to higher ground. The forecast for tonight has the eye of the storm passing just east of Cuba's capital city, which is a collection of flood-prone neighborhoods, low-lying coastal highways and dilapidated apartment buildings that sometimes collapse in lesser storms.
The forecast for western Cuba calls for 10-20 inches of rain today, with a storm surge that should come over seawalls. Cuba has shut down electricity in fishing towns and has moved 35,500 students out of educational farm camps.
Florida is waiting to see what Michelle will do after it crosses Cuba. The crucial time likely will be Monday, when the storm is expected to weaken slightly and turn eastward. Forecasters think it will skirt Florida and will move through the Florida Straits toward the Bahamas.
"The worst of the weather should stay south of the Keys and South Florida," said Jamie Rhome, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "The Keys could get some squally weather. But hurricane force winds extend outward only 35 miles from the storm's center, so our projected path for Michelle would keep hurricane winds out of the Keys."
However, forecasters said it was hard to predict exactly what course the hurricane will take because it had slowed to a crawl for much of the day Saturday. It was drifting north at just 6 mph, gathering strength over the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea.
It was a classic hurricane, with a sharply defined eye and sustained winds of 135 mph.
If Michelle comes just a bit farther north than expected, the Keys and South Florida could be in for hurricane weather.
As it is, the Keys are bracing for the kind of wind and rain that come with a tropical storm. And on the South Florida mainland, the storm is expected to bring 40 mph wind gusts and up to 6 inches of rain.
Some in South Florida remember Hurricane Andrew all too well. They were preparing for the worst-case scenario Saturday.
"We're going to get hit either way," Tom McCarthy said as he covered his convenience store with plywood in the Coconut Grove section of Miami. "We're not taking chances."
All visitors were told to leave the Keys on Saturday. Everyone on Key West and elsewhere west of the Seven Mile Bridge also was ordered to leave. High winds and heavy surf were pounding the beaches.
The usually crowded streets of Key West were nearly deserted. But at the Red Rooster Inn, the sign read, "Hey Michelle, put up or shut up."
The hurricane has killed 12 people in Central America and Jamaica, where emergency crews were digging out Saturday after five days of rain and floods that forced more than 115,000 to flee their homes in search of higher ground.
At the National Hurricane Center, meteorologists have been consulting at least a half-dozen sophisticated computer models to put together their hurricane forecasts. For the past couple of days, one of those computer models has been predicting that Michelle will keep coming north and will hit West Central Florida sometime Tuesday.
This particular model is called the GFDL, for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, where it was created. It takes weather conditions -- wind, atmospheric pressure, water temperatures -- and applies the laws of physics to predict what a storm like Michelle will do.
Forecasters are paying little attention to the GFDL because all their other computer models are predicting that Michelle will stay farther south and will come nowhere near Tampa Bay.
"We are leaning toward the models that have been performing more consistently," said Rhome, the hurricane center meteorologist. "That's not saying that particular model is a bad model, but maybe it doesn't perform as well in this situation."
So, instead of a hurricane for the Tampa Bay area, forecasters are predicting a 40 percent chance of light showers today and Monday.
-- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.