Killer hurricane

last updated 8 January 2015

Pinar del Rio, Cuba

Hurricane Ivan tore through the Caribbean this week with 160 mph winds, smashing thousands of houses and killing at least 68 people. The storm wrecked 90 percent of the homes in the former British colony of Grenada, before nicking Jamaica and barreling through the Cayman Islands and the western tip of Cuba. Howling winds reduced many buildings to splintered wood, and storm tides tossed yachts onto land. “The island looks like a war zone,” a survivor on Grand Cayman said. As The Week went to press, Ivan was crossing the Gulf of Mexico toward the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated, as towns from the Florida panhandle to New Orleans braced for what could be the most powerful storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Andrew, in 1992.