Ivan Prompts Fla. Keys Evacuation

Tourists and residents were told Thursday to evacuate the Florida Keys because Hurricane Ivan could hit the island chain by Sunday. It was the third evacuation ordered there in a month, following Hurricane Charley and hard on the heels of Hurricane Frances.

"It's high anxiety around here," Key West bartender Bob Panrock told CBS Radio News.

Ivan intensified Thursday, heading straight for Jamaica and possibly Florida with 160 mph winds after it killed at least 15 people while pummeling Grenada, Barbados and other islands.

The most powerful hurricane to hit the Caribbean in 10 years damaged 90 percent of the homes in Grenada, killing 12 people there, and destroyed a 17th century stone prison that left criminals on the loose as looting erupted, officials said Wednesday.

Ivan is expected to reach Jamaica by Friday and Cuba by the weekend, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

"It's located about 455 miles southeast of Kingston, Jamaica. It's a Category 5 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds near 160 Miles per hour," meteorologist Gene Hafele told CBS Radio News. "Right now it's a Category 5. It is expected to maybe lose a little bit of its strengthen when it goes across Cuba. It's still forecast to be a Category 4 once it gets north of Cuba."

Evacuation from the Florida keys will be a problem, said bartender Panrock.

"It's 145 miles from here to Miami, and it's a long 145 miles. It's bumper-to-bumper in an evacuation," he said. "Before they can get out of harm's way, they have to understand where the jeopardy is going to be, where to jump to ... All of Florida appears to be in a jeopardy situation."

The last Category 5 storm to hit the U.S. mainland was Andrew in 1992.

"A Category 5, or even a Category 4, storm is nothing to mess with," said Dave Bruns of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. "The best way to survive one of these storms is to be somewhere else when they come ashore."

Jamaican leader P.J. Patterson urged his people to pray.

"We have to prepare for the worst case scenario. Let us pray for God's care," Patterson said Wednesday night. "This is a time that we must demonstrate that we are indeed our brothers' and sisters' keeper."

The United States, meanwhile, declared Grenada a disaster area, allowing the immediate release of $50,000 for emergency relief.

"This is just a jump start," said spokesman Jose Fuentes of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington D.C. "As soon as the initial assessment is done we'll be sending more aid."

Details on the extent of the death and destruction in Grenada did not emerge until Wednesday because the storm cut all communications with the country of 100,000 people, and halted radio transmissions on the island.

"We are terribly devastated ... It's beyond imagination," Grenada's Prime Minister Keith Mitchell told his people and the world on Wednesday — from aboard a British Royal Navy vessel that rushed to the rescue.

British Royal Navy crews from two ships said Thursday they have cleared the damaged and flooded airport runway outside Grenada's capital, St. George's, and that emergency relief flights were starting to arrive in the former colony.

Mitchell, whose own home was flattened, said 90 percent of houses on the island were damaged and he feared the death toll would rise. He said much of the country's agriculture had been destroyed, including the key nutmeg crop.

"If you see the country today, it would be a surprise to anyone that we did not have more deaths than it appears at the moment," Mitchell said.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said virtually every major building in St. George's has suffered structural damage and the United Nations was sending a disaster team. Grenada's once-quaint capital boasted English Georgian and French provincial buildings.

The Caribbean disaster response agency, based in Barbados, said its team arrived Wednesday afternoon along with U.S. aid and Pan American Health Organization officials.

"It looks like a landslide happened," said Nicole Organ, a 21-year-old veterinary student from Toronto at St. George's University, which overlooks the Grenadian capital. "There are all these colors coming down the mountainside — sheets of metal, pieces of shacks, roofs came off in layers."

Students there, mostly Americans, were arming themselves with knives, sticks and pepper spray against looters, said Sonya Lazarevic, 36, from New York City. "We don't feel safe," she said by telephone.

The school's Web site says all students are safe, have adequate supplies, and there are no reports of looting on campus.

When Organ wandered downtown after the hurricane passed, she said she saw bands of men carrying machetes looting a hardware store. She said she saw a bank with glass facade intact on her way down that was smashed when she returned.

While the storm passed, students hid under mattresses or in bathrooms. "The pipes were whistling, the doors were vibrating, gusts were coming underneath the window," Lazarevic said.

"It was absolutely terrifying."

Elsewhere, Ivan pulverized concrete homes into piles of rubble and tore away hundreds of landmark red zinc roofs.

Its howling winds and drenching rains also flooded parts of Venezuela's north coast, and a 32-year-old man died after battering waves engulfed a kiosk.

In Tobago, officials reported a 32-year-old pregnant woman died when a 40-foot palm tree fell into her home, pinning her to her bed.

A 75-year-old Canadian woman was found drowned in a canal swollen by flood waters in Barbados. Neighbors said the Toronto native, who had lived in Barbados for 30 years, braved the storm to search for her cat.

A meteorologist at the Miami center, Hugh Cobb, said that if Ivan hit Jamaica, it could be more destructive than Hurricane Gilbert, which was only Category 3 when it devastated the island in 1988.

Jamaica posted a hurricane watch Wednesday afternoon and ordered all schools closed and fishermen to pull their skiffs ashore and head for dry land. Haiti's southwest peninsula was on hurricane watch and the city of Les Cayes had already suffered hours of drenching downpours Wednesday night.

Ivan became the fourth major hurricane of a busy Atlantic season Sunday.