Ike rakes Guantánamo; leaves no big damage

BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
Off-duty sailors and their families as well as prison camp staff spent the day indoors Sunday, rather than the usual beach and deep-sea fishing activity at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Church services were canceled and stores were closed for what Navy Petty Officer Robert Lamb, a base spokesman, reported early Monday were 30- to 40-knot winds and four- to six-foot swells that whipped the outpost but left behind no damage.
''Overall, the weather seemed to remain constant throughout the night,'' Lamb reported.
While leaves and tree limbs could be spotted strewn around the 45-square-mile base Monday morning, he said, Navy assessment teams found the drainage system held up well.
Guantánamo had been through the drill preparedness four times this season. So by the weekend the base was ready.
Staff canceled Sunday night's feature film at the open-air Lyceum on Sherman Avenue -- and parked front-end loaders and other debris-clearing equipment in its parking lot, a central location.
Sunday's postponed feature was the new Hollywood release Tropic Thunder, an action comedy starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr.
At the prison camps, on a secluded portion of the base overlooking the Caribbean, Army Brig. Gen. Gregory Zanetti declared the prison staff's preparation ''magnificent,'' and guided by the three earlier hurricanes that bypassed the base -- Fay, Hanna and Gustav.
There was no word on whether the military moved any of the 255 or so war-on-terror detainees from the base's sprawling Caribbean-front prison camp to shelters.
At one point, soldiers of the Puerto Rican National Guard, veterans of years of hurricanes, waited out the storm with dominoes and a barbecue at a warehouse while serving support roles at the detention center.
''Morale is high and they are performing admirably,'' Zanetti reported as Ike's first rain bands buffetted the base Sunday afternoon. ``The detainees are being compliant -- and the camps are quiet.''
Only emergency and military vehicles were allowed on the roads throughout Sunday at the base, which is home to about 8,000 military, their families, contractors and the war-on-terror prisoners.
The airfield was also closed and ferry service discontinued as Ike advanced.
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