Hurricane Wilma, which weakened to a still fierce Category 4 storm after breaking intensity records in the Caribbean Sea, has prompted widespread evacuations as it neared the Gulf of Mexico early today.
Thirteen people have died tens of thousands of people have been evacuated in coastal areas from Honduras to the Florida Keys.
Wilma became the fiercest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane ever recorded as it churned towards western Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Densely populated southern Florida is in the storm's projected path in the coming days.
Tourists were ordered out of the Florida Keys and the island of Isla Mujeres near Cancun yesterday, and authorities were poised to move out thousands of others today from low-lying areas in a 600-mile swath covering Cuba, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Jamaica, Haiti and the Cayman Islands.
Storm warnings are in force for Honduras in Central America, where more than 1,000 people died this month after Hurricane Stan triggered mudslides that buried entire villages. Warnings were also posted for the Yucatan, Cuba and Belize.
Wilma's rains triggered mudslides that killed 10 people in Haiti.
Cuba began evacuating thousands of coastal residents, and workers in the western province of Pinar del Rio hastened to protect tobacco seedlings for the next harvest of leaves that make Cuba's famed cigars.
Wilma is heading west-northwest at 8 mph and is expected to turn northwest by later today. It was forecast to skirt western Cuba and move into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, then turn sharply northeast towards Florida.
The season's record-tying 21st storm, fuelled by the warm waters of the northwest Caribbean, strengthened rapidly into a Category 5 hurricane, the top rank on the five-step scale of hurricane intensity.
A US Air Force plane measured top sustained winds of 175 mph early on Wednesday and logged a minimum barometric pressure of 882 millibars, the lowest ever observed in the Atlantic basin.
That means Wilma was briefly stronger than any Atlantic storm on record, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in August, and Rita, which hit the Texas-Louisiana coast in September.