Hurricane Wilma grew stronger and accelerated towards Florida on Sunday, threatening the southeastern US states with winds at 167 kph after devastating Mexico's Caribbean resorts with floods and wild winds that smashed thousands of homes and killed at least eight.

The hurricane will likely come ashore earlier Monday, threatening Florida's southwest coast and islands with strong winds, tornadoes and tide surges that could cause flooding in low-lying lands in these areas.

Max Mayfield, director of the Miami-based National Hurricane Center, said Wilma will dramatically pick up speed as it approaches Florida.

"It's really going to take off like a rocket," he said.

Wilma, a "strong" category-two hurricane in the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, could bring storm surge flooding of 2.7 to five meters above normal tide levels in the southwest coast, warned the center.

Earlier, Florida Governor Jeb Bush urged residents living in the path of Wilma to evacuate and seek shelters.

He said the southern half of the state has already been under a hurricane warning, and an estimated 160,000 residents are persuaded to evacuate, although many of the 80,000 residents in the low-lying Florida Keys island chain at the state's southern tip decided to stay.

"I cannot emphasize enough to the folks that live in the Florida Keys a hurricane is coming, and a hurricane is a hurricane and it has deadly force winds," Bush said at a news conference.

On Sunday, Keys island residents who refused to leave were told to find a safe place to weather the storm and were warned that they were staying at their own risk.

Residents of the city of Naples, on the southwest coast, were also told to stop evacuating and take shelters as the storm approached.

Bush said 2,400 National Guard troops were mobilized, while trucks packed with emergency aid and more than 30 rescue helicopters were on standby. He said authorities expected power outages and flooding.

Wilma began accelerating toward Florida after lashing the Caribbean region for several days. It has hit Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, killing at least eight people in tourist resorts before moving northeast toward Cuba and Florida.

Mexican authorities said on Sunday that eight people were reportedly killed and two remained missing on the Yucatan Peninsula as a result of the storm.

More than 71,000 people, many of them foreign tourists, remained in emergency shelters for a third day on Sunday, unable to leave because of the floods and damage.

Looters took advantage of the chaos. Scores were out at dawn in the Mexican resorts of Cancun and Playa del Carman, raiding appliance stores for television sets, washing machines and other goods, and stealing liquor and clothes.

More than 600 federal police officers and troops were ordered into the stricken resorts to stop the looting.

Wilma inflicted heavy damage on a naval base on Cozumel, officials said. It also pounded western Cuba with heavy rain, floods and high winds.

Four people died in Cuba after a bus ferrying tourists away from areas threatened by Wilma slipped off a wet road Friday, authorities said on Sunday.

About 640,000 people have been evacuated from coastal areas in Cuba, where some 360,000 people have also been left homeless.

Source: Xinhua