WHEN the Caribbean’s worst storm for a decade tore through the tiny island of Grenada, the Prime Minister’s home was among thousands left flattened in its wake.

But the commanding officer of a Royal Navy warship that was anchored off the capital St George’s rescued the shaken Prime Minister and brought him aboard the HMS Richmond and helped him to take charge of the crisis.

Wearing just a T-shirt, shorts and wellington boots, Keith Mitchell, the Prime Minister, made contact with members of his Government and broadcast from the ship via a local radio station to the 100,000 stricken inhabitants.

“We are terribly devastated,” he told them. “It’s beyond imagination.” Police later fired tear gas to stop a looting frenzy.

Having wrecked Grenada, where at least 23 people were killed on Tuesday, Hurricane Ivan is now bearing down on Jamaica. It is also expected to hit Florida, Cuba and Haiti, raising fears of a devastating humanitarian catastrophe.

The damage is part of a trend of increasingly spectacular weather around the world which appears to have reached a peak this week.

Thousands of miles away from the storm-ravaged Caribbean, the heaviest floods in a century have laid waste to a huge swath of southwest China. Japan has endured its seventh tropical storm of the summer, a 15-year high.

In Grenada a clear picture of the devastation began to emerge only yesterday because communications on the volcanic island had been so badly disrupted. Nine out of ten houses were damaged, and the nutmeg crop, a pillar of the nation’s economy, was destroyed.

Howling winds ravaged the picturesque colonial buildings of St George’s and reduced the 17th-century prison to rubble. Among the convicts rumoured to have escaped were the architects of a Marxist coup that triggered the US invasion in 1983 — the last big trauma on the island.

The hurricane pulverised concrete walls, destroyed the emergency centre set up to deal with the relief effort and wrecked every police station. There were reports yesterday of widespread looting.

About 60 officers and ratings from the Richmond and the RFA Wave Ruler are involved in a huge relief effort on the island. They have cleared the flooded runway at the international airport for emergency supplies to be flown in and performed some emergency surgery.

Mike McCartain, 43, the commanding officer of the Richmond said: “We were saving lives yesterday, with many of my sailors ashore doing a lot of good work with people who had suffered quite terribly.”

He said that Mr Mitchell had spent six hours on board and they had helped him to contact his ministers and other authorities in the rest of the world so that they could establish what was happening on the island. After declaring a national emergency and establishing command and control facilities, he was returned ashore to another less heavily damaged residence by a naval Lynx helicopter on Wednesday night.

The United States has declared Grenada a disaster area, allowing the immediate release of $50,000 (£28,000). Jose Fuentes, a spokesman for the US Agency for International Development in Washington, said: “This is just a jump start. As soon as the initial assessment is done we’ll be sending more aid.”

Hurricane Ivan is the most powerful Caribbean storm since Hurricane Luis in 1995 and on Wednesday was upgraded to a Category 5 storm, which is the highest rating on the Saffir Simpson hurricane scale. It has left a trail of destruction across the Windward Islands with roofs torn off, trees felled and power lines brought down. Deaths were reported in Venezuela, Tobago and Barbados.

Ivan is the ninth storm in a busy Atlantic hurricane season. Sweeping through the Caribbean at up to 160mph, the hurricane is expected to strike north for Jamaica where it could prove more destructive than Hurricane Gilbert, which killed 327 in 1988.

“We expect an extremely dangerous hurricane to be heading over Jamaica in the next 24 hours,” Robert Molleda, of the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami said yesterday. “It is now stronger than it was when it hit Grenada. The damage could be worse in a country with poorly constructed shelter and infrastructure.”

Last night Jamaican officials asked 500,000 inhabitants in costal regions to evacuate their homes.

After striking the Cayman Islands and Cuba over the weekend, the centre of the hurricane, where the impact is felt most heavily, “could possibly be over Florida as early as Sunday night or Monday morning”, Mr Molleda said.

Floridians are still clearing up after the battering they received from Hurricane Frances last weekend and Hurricane Charley last month. The two storms killed 42 people and caused up to $10 billion worth of damage. Nearly three million people evacuated their homes.

Heavy rains and tropical storm force winds on Ivan’s fringes could also lash parts of Haiti, where deforestation and shacks make any excessive rain a deadly force.

Heavy rains in May triggered floods that killed some 1,700 people and left 1,600 missing and presumed dead in Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

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