Hurricane Ivan thrashes Grenada

The storm, coming just days after Hurricane Frances, also damaged homes in Barbados, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and appeared set to cross the Caribbean Sea and bear down on Jamaica by Thursday.

In Grenada, howling winds raged through the winding hilly streets of St. George's, the capital, uprooting trees and utility poles, thrashing concrete homes into piles of rubble 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 nonessential staff from a natural gas well off Venezuela's Atlantic coast.

There were no reports of injuries in Grenada, but emergency officials could not be reached. Their office building, the 19th century Great House at Mount Wheldale in the capital, sustained roof damage and its verandah completely collapsed.

"Grenada felt the full brunt of this storm," said Chris Hennon, a meteorologist at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. "Ivan's eye was split in half over the island" with the northern part in the eye wall, the most dangerous part, he said. St. George's, with its historic English Georgian and French provincial buildings, is in the south.

More than 1,000 people rushed to shelters. Grenada has about 100,000 residents who live on several islands.

Ivan's sustained winds were clocked at 120 mph (193 kph) Tuesday as raced through the Windward Islands and forecasters said it could reach Category 4 strength by late Tuesday, with winds of more than 131 mph (210 kph) capable of extreme damage.

At 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), the hurricane's center was about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west-southwest of Grenada and it was moving west near 18 mph (30 kph). Hurricane-force winds extended up to 70 miles (112 kilometers) from the center and tropical storm-force winds another 160 miles (257 kilometers). The storm riled up battering waves and the Hurricane Center warned of possible storm flooding of 3-5 feet (1-1.5 meters) above normal with 5-7 inches (13-18 centimeters) of rain that could cause flash floods and mudslides.

Earlier Tuesday, Ivan damaged at least 176 homes in Barbados, which was buffeted by gusts up to 90 mph (145 kph) as it passed south of the island, according to relief director Judy Thomas and meteorologists. The Atlantis Hotel and Ocean Spray Hotel, just outside Bridgetown, the capital, lost part of their roofs.

"We are very lucky," said Chester Layne, Barbados' chief meteorological officer. "Had we been impacted by the main core of Ivan ... it could have been catastrophic."

In neighboring St. Vincent and the Grenadines, about 600 people sought shelter and at least 45 houses were damaged, officials said. A half dozen houses in St. Lucia lost roofs. Two people there fell while helping neighbors repair roofs and were hospitalized, officials said.

In Tobago nearly 600 people were in shelters and two high schools lost roofs.

Airports, schools, government offices and most private businesses were closed on affected islands.

A hurricane warning remained in effect for Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. A hurricane watch was posted for the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. Tobago, Martinique, St. Lucia and Barbados all were under tropical storm warning.

In Barbados, an island of 280,000 seldom hit by hurricanes, winds whipped away half the roof of the temporary structure housing the retired British Airways Concorde jet donated to Barbados in November, authorities said. The plane was not damaged, they said.

"It was scary," Barbadian Elaine Hope said as she cooked lunch for five grandchildren in a home darkened by hurricane shutters. Hope said her house in east-coast St. Joseph suffered no damage, but the winds tore down her neighbor's fence.

Grenadians had scrambled Monday to prepare for the storm's arrival, nailing plywood planks over windows and installing metal hurricane shutters. A few waited until early Tuesday to finish preparations.

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 U.S. states of Florida and Georgia.

Unlike the Bahamas and the British territory of the Turks and Caicos, where Frances blew off roofs and snapped trees in half, many of the Windward islands are poorer, with old wooden structures in flood-prone areas.