Caribbean Threatened By Hurricane Anxious Residents Prepare As Erika Grows Stronger

Hurricane Erika grew stronger Saturday while it lurked off the northeastern Caribbean, packing 85 mph winds and torrential rain and churning 12-foot seas.

Businesses closed on the threatened islands, shelters opened and anxious residents boarded up homes and stocked up on rations to wait out the storm.

Hurricane warnings were in effect for Anguilla, St. Barthelemy and St.

Martin. Puerto Rico and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands were under a hurricane watch. Hurricane warnings were canceled for Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis and Montserrat.

By midday, most of the islands had weathered brief bursts of rain and strong wind gusts.

“We have some gale-force winds but we did not get much rain. God is smiling on us,” said a relieved McArthur Nedd, owner of Nedd’s Guest House on Barbuda, as he reopened his grocery store for business Saturday morning.

“When I went to bed last night I said, ‘Lord, even now you can turn it away from us. God heard and answered our prayers,”’ Nedd said.

Forecasters warned the storm remained dangerous. Even a slight turn to the west from the Atlantic could punish the northernmost Caribbean islands, and up to 10 inches of rain was expected, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

At 2 p.m. EDT, Erika was centered about 100 miles northeast of the Dutch-French island of St. Martin. It was moving west-northwest at about 12 mph with winds near 85 mph.

Erika generated storm tides 3 feet above normal. Seas could reach 14 feet by Sunday, forecasters said.

Puerto Rican officials said the U.S. commonwealth could get tropical storm-scale winds below 74 mph and heavy rain on Sunday.

A curfew was declared Saturday in the Dutch half of St. Martin, where one of the century’s biggest storms, Hurricane Luis, killed at least five people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars’ damage almost exactly two years ago - Sept. 5, 1995.

Gusts from the storm’s outer edge tossed around outdoor furniture in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where plastic tarps still serve as roofs for dozens of homes damaged by hurricanes Marilyn in 1995 and Bertha in 1996.

Public works crews handed out sandbags to residents in the Virgin Islands’ capital of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas. A team from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived Saturday to advise local authorities.

In Montserrat, officials inspected shelters already overcrowded with people made homeless by the Soufriere Hills volcano. When the sun started peeping from behind the clouds Saturday, many shelter residents breathed a sigh of relief.