NEW YORK-Hurricane Dean, the Atlantic season's first major storm, was heading toward Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula as a powerful Category 4 storm on Monday as it continued to track west across the Caribbean, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory.
Dean passed just south of Jamaica on Sunday with winds near 150 miles per hour, buffeting the island with heavy winds and rain.
At 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT), Dean was located about 330 miles (530 km) east of Belize City, the largest city in Belize, which borders Mexico.
Dean was moving west at 21 mph, with maximum sustained winds still at about 150 mph, and was expected to hit the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula early Tuesday morning.
The NHC said it was likely that Dean would strengthen later on Monday to Category 5 status, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of 156 mph or greater as it continued across the warm waters of the western Caribbean.
A westward or west-northwestward motion was expected to continue for the next 24 hours.
Computer models showed Dean crossing the Yucatan on Tuesday, then moving into the Bay of Campeche in the southwest Gulf of Mexico before making landfall on Wednesday in Mexico between Veracruz and Tampico.
While Dean was not expected to land anywhere near the refineries or key oil and gas producing platforms located along the Texas coast, it was already disrupting oil and gas operations in Mexico's Bay of Campeche.
Mexico's state oil company Pemex said on Monday that it will close all oil and gas wells in the main Campeche Sound region due to the storm, losing production of some 2.65 million barrels of crude per day.
The NHC said it expected Dean to weaken as it crossed the Yucatan but still retain hurricane status before it restrengthens in the Bay of Campeche.
The NHC will issue its next advisory at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT).
Feeds