MIAMI – Hurricane Ivan brutalized the Cayman Islands on Sunday and threatened to bury western Cuba under a mammoth storm surge. One of the most powerful storms ever recorded, it crushed homes in the Caymans, covered Havana with black clouds and provoked sheer panic.

“Oh my God, oh my God, the roof is coming off!” a woman at the Adams Guest House in George Town, on the main island of Grand Cayman, told The Miami Herald by telephone.

Then the line went dead.

Sustained winds of 120 mph blasted the island. Numerous buildings lost their roofs, 5 feet of water flowed through many homes, and power was out throughout the island.

According to ham radio operators, people were standing on their roofs to avoid flood waters.

Most communications networks were severed and no casualty reports from the Caymans were available. Around the Caribbean, 60 deaths have been blamed on the hurricane so far.

Forecasters said Ivan did not pose a significant threat to South Florida, but it kept defying predictions. As a result, watches and warnings were posted from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, through all of Cuba and all the way to the Seven Mile Bridge in the Lower Keys.

The Keys remained under an evacuation order, though officials said it might be lifted Monday morning.

Ivan still was expected to strike the Florida Panhandle later this week, possibly as a Category 2 hurricane with 105-mph winds. State officials urged residents of the Panhandle and Big Bend areas to prepare for evacuations.

In Cuba, some hope surfaced that the nation would avoid Ivan’s worst effects. Each forecast seemed to take the storm’s eye wall a little more west, possibly missing Cuban soil entirely, and Havana seemed unlikely to experience hurricane winds.

But extremely nasty weather will sweep through Cuba on Monday, rain fell across nearly the entire island Sunday and, until Ivan passed completely, many people cowered in fear.

“I would say the atmosphere is one of terror, anguish,” a man told The Herald by telephone as he and his family prepared to evacuate their house in the center of Havana and flee to an inland suburb.

In the village of Guanajay, west of Havana, about 500 people sought refuge in the Jose de Luis Caballero High School, a 12-room, one-story building without windows. Some of them have been homeless since Hurricane Charley ripped through the area last month.

“Charley took half my house,” said a 40-year old mother of six, who was staying at a friend’s house in the village of Artemisa. “I’m sure this will take the other half.”

On the Isle of Youth, closer to the storm’s projected path, residents bemoaned a shortage of wood, nails and other protective supplies. Some also sketched a climate of fearful anticipation.

“What’s coming is a phenomenon,” one woman told The Herald by telephone as the wind began to howl. “I’m horrified.”

Said another Isle of Youth resident: “We are all aware what happened in Grenada and Jamaica and we know the power of the storm.”

The priority? “To avoid loss of human life,” he said.

As it did in Jamaica, the hurricane’s core – and its 155-mph winds – veered away from Grand Cayman at the last minute, but the three populated Cayman Islands absorbed a terrible beating.

Initial reports from the popular scuba-diving destination and banking center spoke of roofs flying off many houses, crashing into nearby buildings, tearing open the door of a public storm shelter.

The storm’s towering waves and torrential rain produced another form of disaster – flooding. Six-foot floods swamped George Town, the capital. Ambulances were under three feet of water.

“I’m at work and the water is up to my knees,” Devon Chisolm, a firefighter in George Town, said Sunday morning. “We can’t help anyone – there’s too much wind and water.”

About 45,000 people live in the Caymans, a low-lying British territory of three populated islands. Some residents and tourists fled ahead of the storm.

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Andrew Golding, an investment banker, fled his Cayman home Friday with his pregnant wife and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter on one of the last flights out. As the storm turned in their direction, he said, seats on the final flights were instantly snapped up.

“We were lucky,” said Golding, who is staying at a New Jersey hotel.

Golding spent a fretful Saturday night and Sunday morning, trying but failing to reach friends who stayed.

“They’re brave people, the type that would go charging off into the night to help someone,” said Golding. “But that’s not something you want your friends to be doing in a storm like this.”

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Forecasters said Ivan’s nearly inconceivable winds diminished slightly, falling from 165 mph late Saturday to 150 mph Sunday evening, but they said the difference was hardly significant.

Ivan remained an extraordinarily dangerous storm, one that inflicted death and widespread damage in Grenada and Jamaica.

At one point Saturday night, hurricane hunter crews measured a central barometric pressure of 910 millibars, making Ivan the sixth most intense Atlantic basin hurricane in history. The central pressure of Andrew, which ravaged South Miami-Dade in 1992, never fell below 922 millibars.

In Cuba, wind damage already was reported in the southeastern province of Santiago de Cuba, where two homes collapsed and at least 10 others were damaged. Thirty-foot waves raked the beaches of two hotels, the Bucanero and the Costa Morena.

Havana Radio told the nation’s 11.2 million residents to “put into practice the solidarity that characterizes our nation.”

Forecasters warned Cubans to expect a huge storm surge – a wall of water up to 25 feet high – if Ivan’s core reverses course again and makes landfall on the Isle of Youth and then in the province of Pinar del Rio.

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If that happens, it could trigger a secondary disaster – one of economics.

Pinar del Rio is Cuba’s third-largest province, one with a swampy coastline but also some of the best, most productive tobacco fields in the world. It accounts for 80 percent of Cuba’s tobacco production, and tobacco exports bring in about $180 million each year.

The Isle of Youth accounts for $100 million a year in grapefruit exports.

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Much of that region is still recovering from Hurricane Charley, which heavily damaged the tobacco industry and knocked out electricity for more than a week.

More than 10,000 homes on the Isle of Youth are considered to be in poor condition because of age or improper construction, according to a Cuban news agency.

“There are no nails or wood and so people are alarmed their properties will be blown away, that’s the main fear,” one resident told The Herald by phone. “‘We don’t have enough resources.”

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Residents of the upper floors of Havana’s high-rise buildings were ordered to evacuate. Later, the streets grew quiet as a light drizzle began falling from dark clouds.

“This city looks deserted,” one resident told The Herald by phone. “Shops are closed. Everything is closed and there’s no traffic or even people on the streets. It’s like a ghost city.”

He said many residents feared that aged or poorly constructed structures would tumble in old Havana – even if the storm’s eye wall passes far to the west, as expected.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.

To some extent, hurricane forecasters might have felt the same way.

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Forecasters kept expecting Ivan to shift toward the north, but it kept tending to move a little more toward the west, apparently because a ridge of high pressure over the Gulf of Mexico and Florida delayed it from making the turn.

In Florida, the tropical storm watch covered the Lower Keys from the Dry Tortugas to the Seven Mile Bridge. That means winds 39 mph and higher are possible within 36 hours.

Still, with the storm consistently predicted to miss South Florida, the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center was deactivated and life returned to something approaching normalcy.

Said Carlos Castillo, the county’s director of emergency management: “The only thing I’m doing storm-wise today is taking down my storm shutters.”

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(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Jennifer Babson, Noah Bierman, Cara Buckley, Alfonso Chardy, Andy Diaz, Mary Ellen Klas, Renato Perez, Bob Radziewicz, Charles Rabin and Jane Wooldridge contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2004, The Miami Herald.

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHICS (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20040912 Storm Ivan, 20040912 Ivan damage

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