Hurricane Ivan now Category 4

Even as Frances battered Florida, a major, quickly strengthening hurricane formed Sunday in the central Atlantic and showed a potential for following a path that would bring it toward Florida.

“You might want to be smart about whether you take down your shutters,” Miami-Dade County Manager George Burgess said Sunday at a briefing on the aftermath of Frances.

Hurricane Ivan had sustained winds of 135 mph, advancing quickly from a tropical storm to a Category 4 storm, the National Hurricane Center said. It could become a Category 5, the most powerful, sometime today, drawing power from hundreds of square miles of warm tropical water, forecasters said.

The small, tight center of Ivan was about 625 miles east-southeast of Barbados late Sunday, too far away to tell with any certainty whether it would hit the continental United States, the hurricane center said.

The center’s five-day forecast suggested a path across the Antilles and Hispaniola, possibly reaching Cuba on Friday. The projection’s “cone of concern” stretched from Jamaica on the left to the Bahamas on the right, with South Florida just beyond the outer limits of the center of the cone.

Ivan was moving west-northwest at about 21 mph and was expected to continue that direction for the next day.

A hurricane watch was up for Barbados, and Ivan was due to reach there by Tuesday.

The government of St. Lucia has issued a hurricane watch, and a tropical storm watch was in effect for Grenada and its dependencies.

After being struck by the back-to-back hurricanes Charley and Frances, Floridians should be wary of the storm, forecasters said.

Both Ivan and Frances formed as tropical storms near Cape Verde off the African coast, an area known as a breeding ground for storms that become big hurricanes.

“They tend to be stronger systems, just because they have such a great environment to grow in as they cross the Atlantic,” said Eric Holweg, a meteorologist at the hurricane center.

Hurricane Charley hit Florida’s southwest coast with 145 mph wind on Aug. 13 and crossed the state, killing 27 people and causing billions of dollars in damage. On Sunday, Hurricane Frances made landfall near Stuart with 105 mph wind.