US:TROPICAL STORM Gustav was expected to strengthen in the warm Caribbean yesterday as it left flooded Jamaica and churned towards the Cayman Islands.
It was heading for the Gulf of Mexico on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's deadly strike on New Orleans.
The storm, which killed at least 70 people in the Caribbean, moved towards the superheated waters south of Cuba where it could absorb enough energy to strengthen into a major hurricane before ripping through the heavy concentration of US oil and natural gas platforms off Louisiana.
New Orleans was still squarely in the storm's sights. The most likely long-range track had it going ashore west of the city on Tuesday morning as a category three storm on the five-stage Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
Crude oil futures climbed in the face of Gustav's threat to the 4,000 Gulf platforms that produce a quarter of US oil and 15 per cent of its natural gas. Energy companies prepared for the most serious storm since the devastating 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.
"The cyclone will have more than 24 hours over the very warm waters of the northwestern Caribbean . . . so strengthening seems imminent and could even be rapid," the US National Hurricane Centre said.
The Miami-based hurricane centre forecast that Gustav would strengthen into a minimal category one hurricane as it passed the Cayman Islands yesterday and then grow into at least a category three storm just after passing the western tip of Cuba.
By yesterday morning, Gustav was off the western end of Jamaica, about 265km east-southeast of Grand Cayman Island, and was moving west-northwest at 13km/h, the hurricane centre said.
Its top sustained winds had dipped to 100km/h, below the 119km/h threshold at which tropical cyclones become hurricanes, but they were projected to rise to 193km/h within 72 hours.
Katrina was a monstrous category five hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico before coming ashore near New Orleans as a category three on August 29th, 2005, breaching the protective levees and swamping the city famous as the birthplace of jazz.
Gustav barged into Haiti as a hurricane on Tuesday and killed at least 59 people there, eight in the neighbouring Dominican Republic and three in Jamaica.
The storm weakened before buffeting the lush, mountainous island of Jamaica with high winds and torrential rains, soaking some sugar cane fields.
Rooftops flew off houses and a 50-year-old man fell to his death after a strong gust of wind blew him out of the tree where he was picking breadfruit. A man and a woman drowned in Gordon Town, north of Kingston, when their home was flooded. In the Cayman Islands, which still has not completely recovered from a near direct hit by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, residents bought storm supplies.The Cayman Islands government released all civil servants from work. - (Reuters)