PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) — A strengthening Hurricane Gustav was expected to make landfall Tuesday in Haiti, where a tropical storm battered the impoverished Caribbean nation less than two weeks ago.
At 1200 GMT, the center of Gustav was located about 75 miles (125 kilometers) south-southeast of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, and was moving toward the northwest at around nine miles (15 kilometers per hour), the National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory.
The Haitian government urged its population to take precautions and appealed for international help to deal with the storm's aftermath, some 10 days after Tropical Storm Fay left about 47 people dead or missing on the island.
"In the face of the danger threatening Haiti, I ask national civil protection committees and our friends in international cooperation to help the government manage the risks and disasters," Interior Minister Paul-Antoine Bien-Aime said on national television.
The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, also issued a hurricane warning for the southwest of the country.
Gustav formed over the Caribbean Sea on Monday, becoming the seventh tropical storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season.
It became a category one hurricane on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale and could grow into a category two storm before making landfall in Haiti later Tuesday, the hurricane center said.
The storm was expected to dump four to seven inches of rain over Hispaniola and Jamaica, with isolated maximum accumulations of up to 15 inches (381 millimeters) possible, threatening to produce flash floods and mudslides, the hurricane center said.
It forecast the hurricane would be near or just south of Cuba on Wednesday.
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