Hurricane Ivan made a direct hit on Grenada with ”hellacious winds”, collapsing concrete homes into piles of rubble and hurling the island’s landmark red zinc roofs through the air.
The most powerful storm to hit the Caribbean in 10 years also damaged homes in Barbados, St Lucia and St Vincent, just days after Hurricane Frances rampaged through.
Ivan strengthened even as it was over Grenada on Tuesday, then became a category-four storm as it headed across the Caribbean Sea on a projected route to bear down on Jamaica late on Thursday.
”They [Grenadians] had about two hours of just hellacious winds … took a really bad beating,” said meteorologist Hugh Cobb of the United States Hurricane Centre in Miami.
”This is a very dangerous hurricane now,” he said. ”Whoever gets this, it’s going to be bad.”
In Grenada, howling winds raged through the hilly streets of St George’s, the capital, trashing concrete homes, uprooting trees and utility poles, and knocking out telephone service and electricity.
Transmission was halted from the Grenada Broadcast Network, whose building suffered major damage.
Several hundred people had been evacuated from low-lying areas of St George’s. ChevronTexaco said it evacuated non-essential staff from a natural gas well off Venezuela’s Atlantic coast. Venezuela’s government put the South American country’s north coast on hurricane watch on Tuesday night, and a hurricane warning was posted for the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao.
Grenadian Prime Minister Keith Mitchell said his home has been flattened, Trinidadian leader Patrick Manning told reporters after a telephone conversation. Manning said Mitchell asked for help and promised to send the eastern Caribbean $3,7-million in food and other aid.
There were reports of at least one death in Grenada, but emergency officials could not be reached for confirmation. Their office building, the 19th-century Great House at Mount Wheldale, sustained roof damage and its verandah was destroyed.
More than 1 000 people rushed to shelters in Grenada, made up of several islands with about 100 000 residents. It is best known for a 1983 US invasion following a left-wing palace coup.
There also were unconfirmed reports that storm damage allowed prisoners to escape Grenada’s crumbling and overcrowded 17th-century prison, a zinc-roofed stone edifice on a hilltop. For more than 20 years, the prison has held 17 inmates, including former Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, convicted for the killings of Marxist leader Maurice Bishop and 10 others in the coup.
Ivan’s sustained winds were clocked at 193kph as it raced through the Windward Islands. But it strengthened to 215kph with gusts up to 258kph on Tuesday night, and Cobb said it was expected to grow even more powerful.
He said it would be the first category-four storm to hit Caribbean islands since Hurricane Luis wrought havoc in 1990.
Cobb said that if Ivan hit Jamaica, it could be more destructive than Hurricane Gilbert, which was only category three when it devastated the island in 1988.
He said Ivan’s heaviest rains, concentrated in its eastern sector, likely will sweep the southern peninsula of Haiti, the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere where deforestation and a proliferation of shacks make any excessive rain a deadly force. Heavy rains in May triggered floods that killed about 1 700 people and left 1 600 missing and presumed dead in Haiti and neighbouring Dominican Republic.
At 2am (6am GMT), Hurricane Ivan was centred about 435km east of Bonaire. Hurricane-force winds extended up to 112km and tropical-storm-force winds another 257km from the eye. The storm riled up battering waves that the Hurricane Centre warned could cause storm flooding of 1m to 1,5m above normal tides with 13cm to 18cm of rain that could cause flash floods and mudslides.
Earlier on Tuesday, Ivan damaged at least 176 homes in Barbados, according to relief director Judy Thomas. The Atlantis and Ocean Spray hotels, just outside Bridgetown, the capital, lost part of their roofs.
”We are very lucky,” said chief meteorologist Chester Layne. ”Had we been impacted by the main core of Ivan … it could have been catastrophic.”
In neighbouring St Vincent and the Grenadines, about 600 people sought shelter, at least 45 houses were damaged and two-thirds of the country was without power, officials said.
A half-dozen houses in St Lucia lost roofs. Two people there fell while helping neighbours repair roofs and were hospitalised, officials said.
Nearly 600 people were in shelters in the island of Tobago, where two high schools lost roofs.
Airports, schools, government offices and most private businesses were closed on affected islands.
Late on Tuesday, a hurricane warning remained in effect in Grenada but St Vincent and the Grenadines downgraded to hurricane watch. A hurricane watch covered Colombia’s Guajira peninsula. Tobago, Martinique, St Lucia and Barbados were under tropical-storm warning.
In Barbados, an island of 280 000 seldom hit by hurricanes, winds whipped away half the roof of a temporary structure housing a recently retired British Airways Concorde. Authorities said the plane was not damaged.
”It was scary,” Barbadian Elaine Hope said as she cooked lunch for five grandchildren in a home darkened by hurricane shutters.
Ivan became the fourth major hurricane of the season on Sunday, coming hard on the heels of Hurricane Frances, which killed at least two people in the Bahamas and 14 in the US states of Florida and Georgia. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writer Eric Nurse in Barbados contributed to this report