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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (23352)	10/1/2000 12:07:24 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

The Perfect Storm just keeps getting better: dailynews.yahoo.com wunderground.com Sunday October 1 12:53 AM ET Mexico's Yucatan on Alert for Hurricane Keith By Fiona Ortiz MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Officials evacuated fishing villages on Mexico's Caribbean coast and put the country's Yucatan peninsula on alert Saturday as Keith turned into a potentially dangerous hurricane and gathered force heading for a Sunday landfall. Precautionary evacuations were going on in a number of small villages south of the resort area of Playa del Carmen on the Yucatan peninsula, an official with the Civil Protection agency in Chetumal city, in Quintana Roo state, told Reuters. He said an unknown number of residents from the small towns of Xcalak, Punta Herrero and others were moving to shelters in Chetumal, on Mexico's southern border with Belize. Forecasters said the Mexican tourism mecca of Cancun lies very near the projected path of Keith, a storm system that took shape two days ago, and picked up enough speed Saturday to become the seventh hurricane of the Atlantic season. The U.S. National Hurricane Center (news - web sites) said Keith would intensify Saturday night, becoming a potentially dangerous storm that could hit land, possibly blowing across the Yucatan Sunday. Keith was blowing at 115 miles per hour (185 kph), with stronger gusts, and was moving slowly westward. At 11 p.m. EDT (0300 GMT Sunday) the center of the storm was off the coast of Mexico and Belize, about 80 miles (130 kms) east-southeast of Chetumal, said a hurricane advisory from the Hurricane Center. Tropical storms become hurricanes when maximum sustained winds reach 74 mph (119 kph). The advisory said Keith ``is expected to turn toward the north Sunday.'' The hurricane was already dumping heavy bands of rain on portions of eastern Yucatan, Belize and northern Honduras. Forecasters warned heavy rains as far as Nicaragua, ''could produce life-threatening flash floods and mudslides.'' In Honduras, a helicopter carrying the country's Supreme Court president disappeared Friday in heavy rains blamed on Keith. Navy and air force planes and helicopters searched for the missing helicopter for a second day Saturday. Civil defense officials evacuated more than 300 people from low-lying areas in different parts of Nicaragua, and put the entire country on low-level alert as floods threatened. Officials said the Keith storm system was influencing the entire Pacific coast. Cancun Near Path ``The hurricane's moving so slowly and looking at the latest cloud pattern, a major amount of rainfall could fall on the Yucatan and Belize,'' Christopher Burr, chief of the Hurricane Center tropical analysis forecast branch, told Reuters. ``The latest track takes it maybe just slightly west of Cancun and Cozumel, but very close. It really just tracks right over the Yucatan peninsula,'' Burr said. Civil protection officials in Mexico said the entire Yucatan peninsula was placed on hurricane alert. Belize widened its hurricane warning south to Monkey River Town. Although Keith was in the Caribbean, and not in the Gulf of Mexico, two of the country's major oil shipping ports on the gulf were on hurricane alert, port officials told Reuters. The Pajaritos oil export terminal in Veracruz state and Dos Bocas port in the state of Tabasco were closed since Tuesday because of weather conditions and remained closed. Burr said the storm had become a Category Two hurricane, still below the most potentially damaging storms such as Mitch, the Category Four 1998 hurricane that hovered off the coast of Honduras sending violent rains that flooded much of Central America, claiming more than 9,000 lives. When Mitch eventually made landfall it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.