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KINGSTON (AFP) - Hurricane Dean unleashed the full force of its 230 kilometers (145 miles) per hour winds on Jamaica Sunday, after leaving a trail of destruction in the Caribbean where it killed at least five people.
"Take this hurricane threat very seriously," Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said in a national broadcast late Saturday, trying to convince people refusing to leave their homes to evacuate the most vulnerable areas along the southern coast.
The category four hurricane was whipping up giant surf and dumping inches of rain on the island.
Roads were blocked by fallen trees and flooded in the eastern parts of the island, with power cuts affecting thousands of homes.
"The sea has dumped debris onto the roads," Portland parish Mayor Bobbie Montague said as the storm surged by Jamaica's southern coast, on course for the nearby Cayman Islands, Mexico and possibly Texas in coming days.
The US National Hurricane Center in its latest report at 2100 GMT placed Dean 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Jamaican capital Kingston and moving along at about 20 miles (32 kilometers) an hour.
Packing winds of up to 145 miles (230 kilometers) an hour, Hurricane Dean "has the potential to become a category five hurricane in the northwestern Caribbean sea tomorrow (Monday)" -- the top strength in the scale.
"Preparations to protect life and property in Jamaica should already have been completed. Preparations in the Cayman Islands should be rushed to completion," the center's latest hurricane report said.
It added Dean could unleash as much as 20 inches of rain on Jamaica in the coming hours, and warned waves could surge seven to nine feet (two to three meters) above normal tide levels.
Jamaica's airports were shut Saturday, and hundreds of people have packed into the 1,000 shelters opened up by the government around the island amid bitter memories of Hurricane Ivan which killed 14 people in 2004.
Prime Minister Miller called on all off-duty police officers, firefighters and prison warders to report for work, while the electricity provider was shutting down the national grid as a safety measure.
The Jamaica Public Service Company said more than 135,000 customers were without power.
There were also fears for some 17 people, believed to be Spanish divers, who had refused to leave the small sandbank of Pedro Cays, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Jamaica, lying directly in Dean's path.
Miller called on all political parties to forget about national elections on August 27 and "put all differences aside as a national emergency is on us ... the safety and wellbeing of people ... must be our only focus at this time."
Mexico was meanwhile evacuating some 90,000 tourists from Cancun and other islands of the "Mayan Riviera," as well as some 13,000 workers on more than 140 of its oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, with Dean set to slam into the Yucatan peninsula late Monday.
A leading risk modeling company, California-based Eqecat Inc., on Sunday estimated initial losses in the Lesser Antilles islands and Jamaica at between 1.5 billion and three billion dollars.
Hurricane Dean earlier brushed past Haiti, lashing it with heavy rain and gale-force winds.
Two people were killed in Haiti's southeastern town of Moron and southern Tiburon, and four people caught on a sailing boat were injured, Haitian officials said.
Haitian Environment Minister Jean Marie Claude Germain, who was heading to the devastated areas, told AFP there had been huge damage to agricultural plantations because the trees had been cut down.
"We are beginning to see the need to put in place policies to reforest our country and find an alternative to burning wood, which is one of the main causes of the deterioration of the environment," he said.
More than 1,000 people were evacuated from low-lying areas in Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries.
Two people were also killed in the French territory of Martinique, while authorities in the Dominican Republic, where a 16-year-old boy was killed when he was swept away by huge waves, warned of the danger of landslides.
The National Emergency Committee there also said that 1,580 people had been evacuated and some 316 houses had been damaged, many of them severely.
In Cuba just to the north of Jamaica, authorities had evacuated some 150,000 people from six eastern provinces to save them from possible flooding.
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