Yucatán braces for Category 5 hurricane

TULUM, Mexico -- Tourists fled the Mayan ruins, shack dwellers in remote areas sought sturdier refuge and oil-field workers turned off the spigots Monday night as a savage Hurricane Dean began its attack on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

A top-rank Category 5 hurricane, Dean menaced a tourist region called the Maya Riviera, the city of Chetumal and one of the world's most crucial oil operations.

Mexico's state oil company, Petroleos de Mexico, said it was evacuating all of its more than 18,000 offshore workers in the southern Gulf of Mexico, which includes the giant Cantarell oil field. Dozens of historically significant Mayan sites also were emptied.

Dean -- which has killed at least 12 people across the Caribbean -- quickly picked up strength after brushing Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

Now, it was Mexico's turn. The first rains arrived around 5 p.m. EDT Monday. By 2 a.m. EDT today, Dean had sustained winds of 160 mph and was centered about 100 miles east of Chetumal, where it was projected to make landfall early today, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. Chetumal is about 120 miles south of Tulum.

Category 5 storms -- capable of catastrophic damage -- are rare. Only three have hit the United States since record-keeping began.

"We'll take them out by force," Tulum Mayor Jorge Luis Cordoba Pech said of anyone who resists evacuation. Many residents of the coastal town live in tin-and-wood shanties. "We can't let them lose their lives."

In Jamaica, which avoided a direct hit, officials reported extensive damage including collapsed houses, destroyed roofs, heavy flooding and impassable roads in many parishes.

The road connecting Kingston to its airport was transformed into a sea of sand, an obstacle course of boulders and downed power lines. That airport remained closed, though the airport in Montego Bay reopened late Monday.

For residents of the tiny Cayman Islands, the news was better Monday.

Dean's vicious eye wall and other hurricane winds bypassed them, veering to the south, though the islands still were subjected to heavy rain, strong gusts and battering 16-foot waves.

Much of the attention, however, turned Monday to Mexico. Dean was expected to push diagonally across the Yucatán from east to west, roaring over populated areas, ancient Mayan ruins, jungles and the western state of Campeche, with 750,000 residents.

Hurricane warnings were posted on both coasts of the Yucatán and in neighboring Belize.

Among the places most at risk: Chetumal, a bayside city of 215,000 people that sits on the border with Belize, and the towns of Tulum, Punta Allen, Mahahual, Felipe Carrillo Puerto and Los Limones.

Many high-end resorts have been built in recent years in that area to serve visitors to nearby ancient Mayan ruins.

Forecasters warned of 5 to 10 inches of rain throughout the region, which includes mountainous sections of Guatemala and Honduras, where flash floods and mudslides can threaten lives.

Another ominous prediction: storm-surge flooding of 12 to 18 feet near and to the north of where Dean makes landfall.

As an early precaution, roads leading south to that region from Cancun were closed Monday, with police manning roadblocks.

It looked as though the vacation centers of Cancun and Cozumel would be spared. Nevertheless, 70,000 tourists and 20,000 residents were evacuated from the region.

Seattle-based Alaska Airlines said the hurricane threat hadn't caused any delays or cancellations for its once-a-day flight to and from Cancun yet, but the carrier could decide to cancel that run by early this morning.

The airline is also waiving its usual fees for passengers who want to change their travel plans. Passengers originally destined for Cancun can delay their trips or fly to another Mexico location without penalty, Alaska spokeswoman Amanda Tobin Bielawski said.

At Cancun's airport, tourists and residents slept on the floor, hoping to board one of the last flights out.

Farther south, directly in the line of fire, officials evacuated small towns along the Caribbean coast, including Punta Allen, a dangerously exposed fishing village and tourist magnet at the tip of a peninsula about 100 miles south of Cancun.

But the heart of the activity -- and the concern -- was in Chetumal, 200 miles south of Cancun and directly in Dean's path. The city sits next to Belize on Chetumal Bay and is a trading partner with its neighbor.

There, officials dispatched hundreds of police officers and soldiers, including 120 federal police officers from Cancun, to maintain order and conduct post-storm recovery actions.

The storm already delivered a blow to one of Mexico's most important natural resources -- oil. Off-shore drilling is the state's most important industry and Pemex shut it completely Monday.

That will reduce worldwide production by 2.65 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day.

But analysts, relieved that U.S. facilities would not be affected, said the Bay of Campeche shutdown -- if brief -- likely would not affect U.S. supplies or prices.

In Haiti and the Dominican Republic, earlier victims of the season's first hurricane shouldered the difficult job of cleaning up and patching up. Officials of both countries described the damage as minimal.

The Associated Press and Seattle Times staff reporter Brian Alexander contributed to this report.