Storm Aims at Mexico; Winds at 175 M.P.H.

Hurricane Gilbert, one of the strongest storms in history, roared toward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula today with 175 m.p.h. winds after battering the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and the tiny Cayman Islands.

The hurricane killed at least five people Sunday in the Dominican Republic, civil defense officials said. Six people died and tens of thousands were left homeless in Jamaica on Monday, officials there said.

Prime Minister Edward Seaga said the hurricane swept the full length of Jamaica, “leaving a trail of wreckage behind it.”

“It will take us some time before we can assess the full damage without any doubt,” Seaga said, but he called Gilbert “the worst disaster that we have experienced in our modern history.”

Seaga was quoted by the New York Times as estimating that 500,000 people--almost a quarter of the population--were left homeless. The Jamaican Office of Disaster Preparedness said there were 15,000 homeless in the capital of Kingston.

Communications were down in many storm-ravaged areas and the death toll was expected to rise with the arrival of damage and casualty reports.

The hurricane, traveling westward across the Caribbean Sea and expected to hit Mexico this morning, was upgraded Tuesday to a Category 5, the strongest and deadliest class of hurricane. Such storms have maximum sustained winds greater than 155 m.p.h. and can cause catastrophic damage.

Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Fla., described Gilbert as “a great hurricane . . . in the top 10% (historically) as far as intensity, size and destructive potential.”

Only two Category 5 hurricanes--an unnamed 1935 storm and Camille in 1969--have struck land this century. Both caused massive damage and loss of life, with the 1935 hurricane striking the Florida Keys and killing 408 people and Camille hitting Louisiana and Mississippi, killing 256.

“If it were actually to hit land with this magnitude, the degree of destruction is incomprehensible, just as it was with Camille,” Sheets said. “We are hopeful this will not take place.”

He said that best estimates showed Gilbert would reach the northwest U.S. Gulf Coast by Friday night with landfall expected slightly to the south of Galveston, Tex.

Gene Graves, marketing director for Petroleum Helicopters Inc. in Lafayette, La., said his company’s 18 helipads were working at full capacity to evacuate oil rigs in the gulf.

An Air Force reconnaissance plane flying through the eye at of Gilbert early Tuesday evening measured a barometric pressure of 26.13 inches, below the 26.35 inches recorded when the 1935 Labor Day hurricane raked the Florida Keys.

“That’s the lowest pressure ever measured in the Western Hemisphere,” said forecaster Mark Zimmer of the hurricane center. The lowest-ever barometric pressure reading was 25.55 inches in a typhoon off Okinawa, Sept. 16, 1945, records showed.

“The people who need to be concerned now are those people over on the Yucatan Peninsula--Cancun, Cozumel, that whole area,” Sheets said.

Mexico’s news media reported beachfront hotels were evacuated in the Yucatan resorts of Cancun and Cozumel Island. They gave no figures on the number but said that people in Cancun were being sent from the hotel zone into the city center, about 6 miles away.

United Press International reported that officials have evacuated 100,000 people in the Cancun area in anticipation of the storm’s arrival. Guillermina Garcia, deputy director of the Novedades newspaper in the state of Quintana Roo, said the evacuees were taken to 30 refugee centers. She said all the “big hotels” were evacuated.

Cozumel is south of Cancun, and reports said hotel guests there also were being moved to more secure areas away from the shoreline.

The massive storm system--Gilbert spanned 500 miles--was moving west-northwest at about 15 m.p.h. with maximum sustained winds of 175 m.p.h. The hurricane center said tropical storm-force winds extended outward up to 250 miles to the north and 200 miles to the south of the center.

Gilbert has cut a path of destruction across the Caribbean since Sunday.

“There is very serious flooding” in the Cayman Islands, said Erina Nichols, a tourism official in Miami, after speaking with residents of the islands.

The storm knocked out all telephone service to the Cayman Islands, a British dependency of 23,000 people.

Herb Schoenbaum, a radio ham operator in the Virgin Islands, said he spoke Tuesday with an American staying in the Wyndham Hotel on Jamaica’s Montego Bay, who reported that the hotel ‘peeled apart like a banana’ when the force of Hurricane Gilbert hit last night,” Schoenbaum said.