Powerful and strengthening Hurricane Ivan killed at least three people in Grenada and devastated its capital, St Georges, as it pounded the tiny islands of the southeastern Caribbean.
Ivan, the ninth storm in a busy Atlantic hurricane season, swept south of Barbados and directly over Grenada, brushing past Tobago as it headed into the Caribbean basin far enough south to prompt precautions on the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela.
Ivan strengthened into a dangerous category 4 storm on the five-step scale of hurricane intensity, and its 135 miles per winds were expected to strengthen as it moved through the Caribbean.
Ivan will pass north of the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao later today. Storm warnings were posted for those islands, along with Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Colombia's Guajira Peninsula and the entire north coast of Venezuela.
The hurricane center's long-range forecast, which has a large margin of error, put the storm over Jamaica on Friday and southwestern Cuba on Sunday.
As it crossed the fragile Windward Islands yesterday, Ivan tore down trees, blew off roofs, knocked out power and forced thousands of people to evacuate coastal areas. It hit hardest in the former British colony of Grenada, a volcanic island of 90,000 people. The storm killed three people in Grenada and destroyed the island's emergency operations center and the home of Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency said.
Ivan damaged Grenada's main hospital and several of its hurricane shelters, forcing some of the 1,000 people who sought refuge there to move to other shelters.
In Barbados, a former British colony of 278,000, Ivan felled trees and power lines, hurled debris around and damaged 220 houses. It blew the roof off the landmark Atlantis hotel, built in 1884 on the seafront at St Joseph, and damaged the roof of a new hangar near the airport housing a preserved Concorde jet. Most of Barbados was without electricity.
On the resort isle of Tobago, the storm ripped off dozens of roofs in 14 villages and knocked out power. The twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago has a population of 1.1 million and is the Caribbean's top oil producer. Trinidad was largely spared, but its energy companies evacuated workers from offshore oil platforms and halted production before the storm hit.