Season's 1st 'Cane Gathers Steam

Warnings Posted In Caribbean; U.S. Landfall Eyed

(CBS/AP)  Haiti, also in the storm's projected path, took the deadliest hit of last year's hurricane season when Jeanne, at the time a tropical storm, triggered flooding and mudslides: 1,500 people were killed, 900 missing and presumed dead and 200,000 left homeless. Torrential rains burst river banks and irrigation canals and unleashed mudslides that destroyed thousands of acres of fertile land in Haiti.

Poverty-stricken Haitians said there was little they could do about the warnings this time.

"It's not only that we don't have money to prepare, we don't have money either to eat. We are willing to stay here and let whatever happens happen," said Martine Louis-Pierre, a 43-year-old mother of three.

At 8 a.m. EDT, the storm was centered about 130 miles southeast of Kingston, Jamaica, and 165 miles south of Guantanamo, moving northwest in the past few hours at about 10 mph, but overall west-northwest at about 13 mph, the Hurricane Center said.

With winds at 105 mph, Dennis was upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane. It became a Category 1 hurricane Wednesday afternoon.

Private forecaster AccuWeather has the storm tracking into the eastern Gulf of Mexico, with landfall Friday or Saturday on the Florida-Alabama border as a strong Category 2 or Category 3 hurricane, with winds from 96 mph to 130 mph.

Radio stations in Haiti and Jamaica warned people to stay away from rivers that could overflow their banks.

"Particularly in the morning, the conditions will begin to deteriorate," Navy Lt. Dave Roberts, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, told CBS Radio News. "The tropical storm-force winds in the next few hours should begin to reach the eastern extremes of Jamaica."

Some southern roads in Haiti, which is dangerously deforested, already were blocked by flooding Wednesday.

In southern Les Cayes, Jose Luis Paez, assistant chief of operations for U.N. civilian police, said 600 civilian police were trying to evacuate people from low-lying areas, but some refused to leave.

Jasmine Romelus, a 22-year-old student, was among them. "Hurricane?" she asked. "They always say there's going to be a hurricane and it never comes."

Six small communities in the eastern Jamaica parish of St. Thomas were also cut off by flood waters. Emergency officials urged coastal residents — a large percentage of the population of 2.6 million — to move inland and ordered schools closed until Friday so they could be used as shelters. Kingston's airport was also closed.

Jamaica's Prime Minister P.J. Patterson abandoned the final day of the annual Caribbean summit in St. Lucia, to rush home. Before leaving, he called on Jamaicans to prepare "to protect those who are infirm, the elderly and the young."