Florida prepares for worst Intensity and course of storm are hard to predict

Mexico fears Wilma will devastate the Yucatan peninsula's coast.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
MIAMI -- As Hurricane Wilma slowly bore down on the Yucatan with the power to wreak havoc on one of Mexico's top tourist destinations, far to the east, in Florida, officials and residents began getting ready Thursday for the storm's potentially destructive arrival in their state.
"Right now, we're telling our folks to be prepared," said Sherry Montgomery, a government spokeswoman in Charlotte County, home to 150,000 year-round residents on Florida's southwestern coast.
As Wilma, with sustained winds of near 150 mph, blew toward an expected landfall in the Yucatan peninsula late this morning, though, it remained something of a meteorological enigma: its future intensity and course -- and the risk it posed for Florida -- difficult to predict.
Much, said weather experts, was riding on what happened over the next 48 hours.
"A lot depends on how long Wilma spends over the Yucatan, today, tomorrow and Saturday morning," said Ben Nelson, Florida's state meteorologist. "Whenever you have a storm sitting over land, it's going to decrease in intensity."
Will be monitoring it
Nelson said he and many other Floridians would spend what he deemed "an agonizing weekend" monitoring Wilma's progress. As of Thursday, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were predicting Wilma might reach Florida late Sunday or early Monday anywhere along a broad swath of its western shoreline, from the northern Gulf Coast to the Florida Keys.
"There are all kinds of possibilities -- not many of them good," said Greg Artman, an emergency operations official in the Keys.
In Mexico, officials feared that if Wilma continued on its northwesterly tack, it could sweep along the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. A direct hit there could be a "tremendous disaster," said Jaime Albaran, a meteorologist and spokesman for Mexico's national weather service. "This is a very, very powerful storm."
As Wilma, whose forward motion slowed Thursday to 6 mph, got nearer, Cancun Mayor Francisco Alor announced the evacuation of the city's hotel district. According to Mexican media, about 30,000 tourists had left.
Felix Gonzalez Canto, governor of Quintana Roo province, which includes Cancun, told reporters that police and government workers were going door to door to make sure people with tin roofs and wooden walls had evacuated.
For Florida, Nelson said, the worst-case scenario would be the hurricane remaining over water as it crossed the Yucatan Channel that links the Caribbean Sea with the Gulf of Mexico. "That would allow it to enter the Gulf as a Category 4 hurricane," he said.
And the ideal?
"We're not wishing any harm on the tourist areas of the Yucatan," said Nelson. "But the best scenario for Florida is that the storm stall over the Yucatan for a day or two."
Storm surge
Authorities in Florida were concerned especially about the potential for large-scale storm surge of the kind stirred up by Hurricane Katrina, which leveled much of the Mississippi Gulf coast. If Wilma is still a Category 4 hurricane when it reaches the Gulf, it could raise ocean levels by 10-15 feet, Nelson said. The Florida Keys and southwestern Florida coast, both low-lying areas, could be swamped, he said.
On Saturday, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said, the hurricane should veer toward the northeast and pick up speed as a low-pressure trough forming over the central United States starts to influence its track. It could reach Florida as anywhere from a Category 1 to Category 3 hurricane, with a tremendous difference in its capacity to inflict damage, they said.
Stung by charges of incompetence and neglect in its response to two earlier hurricanes this year, Katrina and Rita, officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said they were doing everything they could to help Florida get ready for its eighth hurricane since August 2004.