WEST PALM BEACH, Florida, Sept 4 (AFP) - South Florida tasted the fury of Hurricane Frances Saturday as the monster storm churned through the Caribbean, lashing the coast with driving rain and winds and promising worse to come in the night.
Police enforced a dusk-to-dawn curfew and implored 2.5 million coastal residents to flee inland.
State authorities warned against being deceived by the eerily calm eye of the storm, whose landfall was expected in the early hours Sunday.
"Because the storm is so huge it could take hours for the eye to pass over the coastal area," said Governor Jeb Bush. "It might take more than four hours for the eye to pass. It might give the impression the storm is over."
Once the eye is passed, said Bush, the far side winds will come from the opposite direction, but with the same fury as the first wave.
"We know that the storm, despite the fact it has weakened in terms of hurricane force winds, will do damage to a whole lot of places," Bush told a news conference.
Weather authorities said the eye of Hurricane Frances was particularly wide, more than 100 kilometers in diameter, slated to center between Palm Beach and Fort Pierce, 100 miles north of Miami, a region with 1.5 million people.
"The eye is going to pass right over Fort Pierce," said St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara.
"We are imposing a mandatory curfew from 1 pm today (1700 GMT) until further notice. We are expecting four to five hours of hurricane force wind. As the eye crosses the region, we will have a calm window of 3 to 4 hours, then strong wings again. Don't get out!"
The purpose of the curfew, said authorities, was to protect people from injury, but also to prevent looting at the hurricane force winds shattered shop windows and ripped out store fronts.
Police said three suspected looters were arrested in Palm Beach County on Saturday.
St. Lucie County Administrator Doug Anderson said, "We will have hurricane winds in excess of 100 mph starting tonight around 11:00 pm (0300 GMT Sunday). The area is loosing power, even at the emergency center."
At 8:00 pm Saturday (0000 GMT Sunday) the eye of the storm was 80 kilometers (50 miles) out to sea. At that hour, said authorities, 495,000 people in Palm Beach County, 75,000 in neighboring Martin County and 78,000 in St. Lucie County to the north were without electricity.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned that, although Frances had lost some force crossing the Caribbean, it remained "an enormous storm, with heavy rains."
Most of the deaths in a hurricane are the result of floods, powerful enough to lift motor vehicles and carry them hundreds of meters, said FEMA.
Palm Beach late Saturday was a landscape of devastation, its beachfront strewn with broken palms, its streets and parking lots littered with uprooted trees, downed power polls and tattered billboards.
"If you are in an evacuation zone you must leave your homes," cautioned Palm Beach Fire Chief Don Delucia.
Shelters set up in schools and public buildings up and down the coast already held some 30,000 people.
The National Hurricane Center said Frances, after passing over the Bahamas, where it killed one person, had slowed almost to a standstill but was picking up to an estimated seven km (4 miles) an hour in a northwesterly direction, with the strongest winds expected to strike the Florida coast during the night.