This is a bad one:
Powerful Hurricane Ivan charged west through the Caribbean on Wednesday after killing at least four people and smashing homes in a devastating punch to the tiny spice island of Grenada and glancing blows to nearby islands. Ivan's 140 mph (225 kph) winds prompted storm alerts for the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonair and Curacao, the north coast of Venezuela and Colombia's Guajira peninsula and parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The latest storm in a very busy Atlantic hurricane season, Ivan roared into the southeast Caribbean on Tuesday, churning right over Grenada and delivering side swipes at Barbados, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Tobago.
Grenada, a volcanic island of 90,000 people that is a major producer of nutmeg, cloves and other spices, was worst hit. The storm killed at least three people and devastated the capital, St George's, destroying the island's emergency operations center and the home of Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency said. A helicopter took off from a nearby British Navy ship and flew over the island on Wednesday to assess damage and to find out if the airport was usable, said Donovan Gentles, CDERA's Preparedness and Response manager. The island had suffered "total devastation," Gentles said.
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At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), Ivan was about 145 miles east-northeast of the island of Bonaire, at latitude 12.7 north and longitude 66.2 west, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It was moving west-northwest at 16 mph (25 kph) on a course that would take it north of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao later on Wednesday. A dangerous Category 4 storm on the five-step hurricane intensity scale, Ivan was expected to hit Jamaica on Friday. | NOAA projected track here. |
The center's longer-term forecast, with a wide margin for change, had the storm passing over Cuba during the weekend. Farther north in Florida, residents and officials eyed Ivan warily, although it was too soon to predict if the storm would deliver a third hurricane to the state in a month. | Multiple computer models can be seen here. It don't look good, although it's too soon to tell. Western end of Cuba is fairly flat, won't take off too much strength. |
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