U.S. SUGAR -- UPDATED HURRICANE WILMA DAMAGE

CONTACT: JUDY SANCHEZ 863-902-2210

November 1, 2005 -- Clewiston, FL, “Agriculture in our area has sustained a terrible blow, with damage both significant and widespread, particularly in sugar and citrus,” said Robert Coker, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs.

"We are slowly working our way through the post-hurricane process of getting our operations back up and running and assessing damage to our sugarcane and citrus crops. Many of our employees have lost their homes. Obviously, it is going to take a long time to recover from the damage Wilma wrought," Coker said.

Sugar Operations
It will take another week or so to get into each of our sugarcane fields and fully assess the damage. We know it was substantial and widespread across the entire sugarcane growing area. We lost 25% of our crop during last year’s storms, and Wilma was much more destructive to our area.

On a positive note, we have resumed full harvest and processing operations at both our raw mills. The twisted and recumbent cane stalks will slow harvest activities and greatly increase the cost of harvest as well as lower the quality of the raw sugar.

The Clewiston Refinery lost part of its roof, but we patched it up and started refining sugar last Sunday night. We do not expect any problems with meeting our customers’ sugar needs at this time.

For the time being, the most critical issue is the severe damage to our raw sugar warehousing sheds. The majority of our sugar sheds were blown down. The cost of re-building these warehouses will run into tens of millions of dollars.

Our roads, pumps, shed and equipment shops were also damaged by the hurricane. These also represent a significant cost to repair and replace.

U.S. Sugar's railroad suffered significant damage as locomotives and railcars were blown over, around and off the tracks due to hurricane and tornado forces. Railroad tracks were damaged and crossing guards blown down. We have repaired some of the most vital parts of our railroad and will continue working closely with DOT to deal with these issues.

Citrus Operations
After our initial inspections, we are seeing that 30-50% of the fruit that was on the trees prior to Wilma is now on the ground. From what we have seen, this is not unusual for groves in the hurricane’s path. Further fruit loss will occur from these hurricane-stressed trees, however, to what extent we do not know.

So far, the weather has been favorable and we have begun salvage operations by harvesting and processing the fruit at Southern Gardens Citrus Processing facility, which suffered mainly surface damage.

We will have more information as our ongoing field by field damage assessments are completed.