| Caribbean Counts Dean Damage |
By BBC Caribbean
August 20, 2007
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Jamaican authorities were on Monday assessing the damage after Hurricane Dean uprooted trees and ripped roofs in southern Jamaica.
Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller declared a month-long state of emergency, widening the powers of the country's security forces. |
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| A curfew is also in place to prevent looting. |
| The storm, with winds just over 230km/h (145mph), careered along the country's south coast, its eye passing some miles away out to sea on its way to the Cayman Islands. |
| Dean has already claimed at least six lives in the eastern Caribbean. |
| Haiti and the Dominican Republic were spared the worst as Dean passed to the south overnight on Saturday - damage was limited to flooding in coastal areas. |
| Two have been reported dead in Haiti as over 1,000 people were evacuated from low-lying areas. |
| Aid workers told BBC Caribbean on Monday that stepped-up disaster preparedness had helped Haiti this time around. |
| They said that it cold take a few days for damage resports to be gathered from remote villages on Haiti's south coast, its south-west peninsula, and on the border with the Dominican Republic. |
| It is not clear whether August 27 general elections in Jamaica will be postponed. |
| On Sunday night, prime minister Simpson-Miller confirmed that Tuesday's early vote for polling station officials and the security forces would be delayed. |
| BBC correspondent in Jamaica, Karen Madden, said that the authorities were expected to meet to discuss both the clean-up and a timetable for elections. |
| "This morning, the first order of business for most residents is a massive clean-up," Madden told BBC Caribbean on Monday. |
| Madden described "a lot of debris, a lot of fallen trees, a lot of rooftops off. There's no electricity, most of the houses are out of water." |
By mid-morning on Monday, the Cayman Islands said it seemed they'd been spared as Dean veered further south than initially predicted.
Over Friday and Saturday in the Cayman islands, many of the business community had flown out on chartered jets to continue their work at temporary |
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| sites in the US and in Colombia. |
| Tourists had also mostly left the Cayman Islands after extra flights were laid on. |
| The National Hurricane Centre in Florida is now advising northern Belize and the Mexican Yucatan peninsula to keep an eye on Dean. |
| Six deaths have been confirmed as a result of Dean: |
| A boy was swept out to sea and drowned in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. |
| In Martinique, a woman in her early 80's died of a suspected heart attack during the hurricane's passage, while a man died after sustaining a fall. |
| In Dominica, a landslide crushed a woman and her seven-year-old son while they slept in their home. A man aged 62 was swept away and drowned when he tried to retrieve a cow from a rain-swollen river. |
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