Hurricane Bertha’s Force Is Expected to Stay at Sea

Hurricane Bertha, a massive storm which quickly bulked up into a monster while ripping through the Caribbean, was expected to veer away from the U.S. like an unwelcome guest today, becoming a serious menace only to ships at sea.

“Our forecast is for Bertha to go back out to sea--but after coming close to the coast,” said Jerry Jarrell, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center.

Although Florida seemed out of harm’s way, forecasters warned that the Carolina coast could feel the backside of Bertha’s fury later this week before the system curves back into the Atlantic. Jarrell urged residents of Georgia, and South and North Carolina to monitor the storm’s track.

With top winds at 115 mph, Bertha was moving northwest, east and parallel to the Bahamas late Tuesday, driving a 460-mile-wide swirl of bad weather.

The season’s first hurricane claimed at least four lives in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, wreaked widespread damage to homes and other buildings in the Leeward Islands, and threw a scare into South Florida residents.

Until midday Tuesday, most forecast maps had the storm just two days away from landfall on Florida. In South Florida, emergency planners were meeting, stores were crowded early with shoppers snatching up canned goods, water and batteries, and flashbacks to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 were commonplace.

“We went through 200 cases of water, normally a week’s supply, in 30 minutes early this morning,” said Allen Milam, owner of a family-run supermarket in southwest Miami. “Very hectic.”

But a trough of low pressure pushing down through the mid-Atlantic states should serve to block Bertha’s northwestward march while southwest winds sweeping from the Caribbean turn it away from the U.S. mainland. High pressure behind the trough, in combination with a dome of high pressure over Bermuda, are expected to frame a funnel through which the storm will blow northward out into the ocean by Thursday.

Most computer models now suggest that only the winds of Bertha’s west, or weaker, side could affect the Carolina coast later in the week.

In Puerto Rico, U.S. Coast Guard ships and planes were still searching Tuesday for a vessel reported in distress the day before. According to a ham radio operator in Venezuela, who relayed the message to Puerto Rican civil defense authorities, the vessel Jamaica, with 42 people aboard, was in trouble off the north coast of the island.

No signs of the vessel had been found Tuesday. “We have searched 8,000 square miles of ocean, and although we have no solid leads, we are still treating this as a real search and rescue,” said Petty Officer Dennis Uhlenhopp.

As a Category 3 storm, Bertha is a mid-sized but dangerous hurricane, capable of tearing roofs from houses, kicking up a storm surge of 9 to 12 feet, and dumping several inches of rain. It is also unusually broad-beamed, with gale-force winds of at least 39 mph extending out more than 200 miles in all directions from the well-defined eye.

Bertha ran roughshod over a chain of northeastern Caribbean islands on Monday as a minimal hurricane, with winds of about 90 mph. In Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis, and the British Virgin Islands, all battered hard last hurricane season, roofs were lifted, trees uprooted and power was knocked out.

On St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where about 80% of the homes were damaged last September by Hurricane Marilyn, Bertha flattened an unoccupied school and sent hundreds of frightened residents into emergency shelters. A sea wall was breached on St. Croix, and flooding was reported on both islands.

Damage in Puerto Rico was minor, although two persons in the U.S. commonwealth died in a storm-related car crash.