Hurricane Bertha Lurches Toward Carolinas, Georgia

Hurricane Bertha, a massive storm which quickly bulked up into a monster while ripping through the Caribbean, was making its way toward the eastern seaboard of the United States on Tuesday night.

The National Weather Service issued hurricane watches for Georgia, and South and North Carolina, and a tropical storm warning for Florida. A watch means the hurricane could come close to the area within 36 hours.

Hurricane warnings were in effect Tuesday for the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Bahamas, 250 miles east of Florida.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami expected Bertha to skirt the coast from Florida to Delaware.

By late today, they should know just how close it will come to land, forecaster Chris Landsea said.

“It depends on how close it gets before it makes the turn” due north, Landsea said. “When it’s going to turn is the $64,000 question.”

Jerry Jarrell, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, urged coastal residents to monitor the storm’s track.

With top winds at 105 mph, down from 115 mph earlier in the day, Bertha was moving northwest at 21 mph Tuesday night, driving a 460-mile-wide swirl of bad weather.

“This is a huge storm--it’s like Hugo in ’89 or Gilbert in ‘88,” Jarrell said.

The season’s first hurricane claimed at least four lives in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, wreaked widespread damage on 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.”

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.

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 during the 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.