Cuba's brightly painted but decrepit buildings were caked waist-high with mud and on the outskirts of the capital, streets were filled with silt and debris left by the storm, which some Cubans said was the worst they had seen in years.

"I have no place to sleep or anything," said Arelis de la Caridad, 32, homemaker, in Santa Fe, 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of Havana.

"When the sea is angry, no one can stop it," she said.

Outside, tractors and horse carts were pressed into service toting away debris from houses that had been crushed by the sea.

Civil Defense officials allowed residents to return in stages to their homes.

Although Cuba lies in the path of many Caribbean hurricanes, storm surges rarely top Havana's stone sea wall, the Malecon, as did Wilma, although the hurricane was 130 kilometers (80 miles) off the coast on its way to Florida.

In fact, Wilma toppled parts of the Malecon and charged into buildings behind it, knocking out walls.

Cubans rose early to begin cleaning mud out of the first floors of their homes and searching for food in the few markets and shops that opened Tuesday.

Officials allowed children to return to school Tuesday in areas where conditions permitted.

"Everything is flooded," said Evangelina Hinojosa, a 71-year-old retiree.

"The waves took out the walls and the door broke. The sea came in and didn't leave me anything," she said.

Cuba's electrical grid suffered serious damage during the storm, and wide areas have been without power since Wilma struck.

Line crews struggled with Cuba's feeble electrical network, but many parts of the country remained off line to avoid accidents. Some parts of Cuba had no water because electricity is needed to run the pumps.

Officials said no one had been killed or injured in the flooding, but damage to homes was high.

"More than 2,000 houses were covered by water and another 2,000 were damaged just in Santa Fe," Civil Defense chief Luis Angel Macareno said.

Civil Defense reported that 790,000 persons had been evacuated before the storm, 120,800 of those in Havana, where homes suffer from age and poor maintenance.

Authorities said some 260,000 people had been evacuated from the province of Pinar del Rio, west of the capital, which was hit with strong rains and flooding.

Rescue workers in inflatable boats patrolled some districts seeking to help those in need.

ERS-2 has ringside view of Hurricane Wilma's violent winds
Paris (SPX) Oct 26 - As Hurricane Wilma barrels towards the Florida coast, a last-minute acquisition by a unique instrument aboard ERS-2 is helping strengthen weather forecasters' final predictions of its landfall course and strength.

The ERS-2 radar scatterometer data shown here was acquired by the satellite on 04:30 UTC this morning (06:30 CEST), then relayed via the ground station of the Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing (CSTARS) at the University of Miami to be speedily processed by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), being made available to forecasters to analyse within the hour.

Envisat MERIS Reduced Resolution mode image of Hurricane Wilma acquired 21 October, with a spatial resolution of 1200 metres, as the storm is about to strike the Yucatan Peninsula, with the well-defined eye wall close to Cozumel Island. Credits: ESA

"ERS scatterometer data are very useful to correct position and strength of tropical cyclones in numerical weather analyses and prediction," said Ad Stoffelen of the KNMI. "For its application one must note that each scatterometer wind is measured in a wind cell of about 50 by 50 km.

"For this case the maximum mean wind measured over such extended area is about 100km/hour. Given a tropical cyclone model, meteorologists know that local sustained winds are typically 50% larger, and gusts may reach speeds even three times larger."

Dr Hans Graber of CSTARS added that as Wilma has yet to make landfall, the scatterometer data would be swiftly passed to the US National Hurricane Center "which will aid in their advisories setting marine conditions and predicting the strength of winds at landfall".

Envisat view of Hurricane Wilma, 21 October

The payload of ERS-2 � ESA's veteran Earth Observation satellite launched back in 1995 - includes the only radar scatterometer currently flying capable of peering through the thick clouds and rain swirling around Wilma to chart the underlying wind fields powering the storm.

This instrument works by firing a trio of high-frequency radar beams down to the ocean, then analysing the pattern of backscatter reflected up again. Wind-driven ripples on the ocean surface modify the radar backscatter, and as the energy in these ripples increases with wind velocity, so backscatter increases as well. Scatterometer results enable measurements of not only wind speed but also direction across the water surface.

What makes ERS-2's scatterometer especially valuable is that its C-band radar frequency is almost unaffected by heavy rain, so it can return useful wind data even from the heart of the fiercest storms � and is the sole scatterometer of this type currently in orbit.

Derived cloud-top pressure for Wilma

As well as being processed by KMNI, scatterometer data are also routinely assimilated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) into their advanced numerical models used for meteorological predictions.

Wilma struck the Mexican coast on Friday, but dampened down from a Category Four storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale down to a Category Two. Back over the open sea, the storm strengthened and sped up to a Category Three.

To maintain future continuity of scatterometer coverage, a new more advanced scatterometer instrument called ASCAT is part of the payload for ESA�s MetOp mission, currently due to launch in 2006.

Related Links
ERS-2 Scatterometer data from KNMI
CSTARS
US National Hurricane Center
ECMWF
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