Tourists packed Cancun's airport and shuttled from luxury hotels to spartan emergency shelters on Thursday, desperately trying to escape Hurricane Wilma as its outer bands battered the resort's white-sand beaches. Meanwhile, Cuba has evacuated more than 200,000 people.

Wilma, a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds, churned towards the Yucatan peninsula and south Florida after brushing Jamaica and Haiti, where it killed at least 13 people.

Forecasters said the storm was expected to make a direct hit on the vacation isle of Cozumel on Friday, and then slam into Cancun and take a swipe at Cuba.

"As it hits the Yucatan peninsula, it has the potential to do catastrophic damage," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Forecasters predicted it would swing northeast around Cuba and charge on Sunday at hurricane-weary Florida. Governor Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency, after the state got caught in the westerlies, the strong wind current that generally blows toward the east.

Briefly the most intense Atlantic hurricane on record, Wilma was a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm before weakening. Its 150 mph winds made it more powerful than Hurricane Katrina when it plowed into the US Gulf coast on August 29, killing more than 1,200 people.

The National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Florida said that by early Friday, the storm's wobbly centre was roughly 90 miles southeast of Cozumel. But hurricane-force winds extended 85 miles out from the centre, and tropical storm-force winds reached 200 miles out. It was heading northwest towards the Yucatan peninsula at around 6 mph.

Tropical storm-force winds and rains were already hitting Cozumel by Thursday night. Hundreds of schools in Yucatan were ordered closed and many were turned into shelters. Airlines started canceling flights.

While hundreds were evacuated from Cozumel, Mexican officials said about a thousand tourists stayed on the island, mainly at hotel ballrooms being used as storm shelters. About 20,000 tourists remained at shelters and hotels on the mainland south of Cancun, and an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 in the city itself.

"The most important thing now is to protect lives, protect the lives of our children, of our grandparents," President Vicente Fox said in a broadcast address to the nation.

After the Cancun airport closed, desperate tourists shuttled from luxury hotels to emergency shelters ahead of Wilma, which forecasters said was growing stronger. Cuba evacuated more than 200,000 people as the storm approached.

Matt Williams and Jeff Davidson from New Jersey, USA, were going back to their hotel in Playa del Carmen south of Cancun after their flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. was cancelled. At the hotel, they faced a night in a ballroom-turned-emergency shelter.

"You see the lines. I don't want to stand there for two hours and then decide what to do," said Williams, 26.

Source: China Daily