SIX CAPE RESIDENTS IN HURRICANE; RESORT IN PUERTO RICO IS HOME WHEN BERTHA HITS

Hurricane Bertha likely will miss the U.S. mainland, but it has touched six Cape Girardeau residents.

Monday in Puerto Rico, Steve, Beverly, Courtney and Stephanie Boren, Chris Thompson and Jill Wittenborn got a bit more of the tropical life than they had bargained for.

Since February the Borens have been in Humacao, Puerto Rico, where Steve Boren has been working with Sun Oil Co. through Nooter Construction of St. Louis. Thompson and Wittenborn joined them Saturday on a short vacation.

Steve Boren said he hadn't heard anything of Hurricane Bertha, even as it was bearing down on Puerto Rico, until Sunday when he and Beverly were at a grocery store.

"It was packed," he said. "We assumed something was going on by the way everyone was stocking up."

Boren said they don't watch much television because most of the programs are in Spanish and they therefore missed the hurricane warnings. When they returned from the grocery, they learned Bertha, which was packing winds of 103 mph, was to hit the island around 2 p.m. Monday.

"You had six worried families up here," said Maxine Boren, Steve Boren's mother. "We were all concerned Monday because our kids were there."

Luckily, Bertha veered to the north, and Puerto Rico was spared a direct hit. But for four hours the Borens' resort was subjected to driving rains and incredible gusts of wind.

"The power went off about three times," Steve Boren said. "The rain started around 2 o'clock, then the gusts hit about 3 o'clock. There was no place for us to go so we stayed in and mostly played cards all day."

Boren said he could see little damage from the storm.

"Some coconuts had been blown out of the trees," he said. "You didn't want to be walking under those trees today."

With four people dead in its wake, the hurricane whipped up force Tuesday, menaced the Bahamas and headed for the eastern seaboard of the United States. It was expected to skirt the U.S. coast from Florida to Delaware, without making any more direct hits on land.

The National Weather Service said it probably would issue a hurricane watch for part of the southeast U.S. coast overnight. 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, eastern Cuba and the southeast and central Bahamas, 250 miles east of Florida.

Bertha became more dangerous early Tuesday, spinning winds up to 115 mph that upgraded it to a Category 3 storm capable of extensive damage. Its size alone - 460 miles around - makes it formidable, said Jerry Jarrell, deputy director of the U.S. Hurricane Center in Miami.

Forecasters earlier had thought Bertha would probably stay south of the United States. By 7 p.m. CDT, Bertha was about 115 miles east of San Salvador, in the center of the 700-island Bahamas archipelago.

Its wind speed had decreased slightly to 110 mph as it moved toward the northwest at 21 mph, a motion expected to continue for the next 24 hours. That would bring the eye of the storm near or just east of the central and northwestern Bahamas.

Coast Guard officers in Puerto Rico were searching for a crippled boat with as many as 42 people aboard. The boat radioed Monday that it was in the eye of the hurricane and passengers were jumping into the water, the Coast Guard said. There was no sign of the boat Tuesday afternoon.

In Bertha's wake, residents of northeastern Caribbean islands took stock of the damage: electricity and telephone poles uprooted or hanging at drunken angles; tree trunks blocking roads; power outages; houses with ripped-off roofs that left belongings at the mercy of torrential storms.

Yet many islanders were relieved that they did not suffer like they did last year in the worst Atlantic storm season in 60 years.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press.