The world's five most expensive natural disasters

The British Red Cross issued urgent funding appeals today to help tens of thousands of Haitians left homeless by Hurricane Hanna and to help the residents of the Turks and Caicos Islands to brace for the arrival of an even more powerful storm this weekend.

Hanna, now downgraded to a tropical storm, dumped a huge amount of rain as it passed over Haiti, setting off floods and landslides that claimed at least 136 lives. Worst affected was the city of Gonaives, which remained under water last night.

The storm is now barrelling up the US East Coast and is expected to regain hurricane status before hitting land somewhere in the Carolinas. The governors of North Carolina and Virginia have declared states of emergency while South Carolina has begun to evacuate the two counties expected to be worst affected.

But forecasters and relief officials are now more concerned about Hurricane Ike, which is rolling through the western Atlantic producing maximum sustained winds of more than 200kph (120mph).

Ike was today downgraded from Category Four to Category Three on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale but is expected to remain at hurricane level as it moves westward towards the Florida coast over the next few days.

On Sunday, it is expected to rumble past the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Overseas Territory where hundreds have already been left homeless by Hanna, which hit the islands twice this week after looping around on itself.

Pete Garratt, Relief Manager at the British Red Cross, said Ike was expected to be "quite an exceptional storm" in an area well used to hurricanes, and the Red Cross was hoping to send in thousands of tarpaulins, blankets, hygiene kits and jerrycans before Sunday. "For us, it's like responding to a crisis in a part of Wales," he said.

But the main Red Cross effort, co-ordinated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, is focusing on the situation in Haiti, where emergency shelter and other relief supplies are being flown in from Panama.

As well as the Turks and Caicos, Ike is expected to cause severe damage in the Bahamas, a contiguous island group, before heading to the American coast. It is expected to make landfall in Florida, probably around Fort Lauderdale, on Tuesday.

"Ike looks like it’s a very, very dangerous storm," said David Paulison, who heads FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The storms follow Hurricane Gustav, which ripped through the Caribbean then slammed the into the US Gulf Coast near New Orleans, and Tropical Storm Fay, which also pounded several Caribbean islands and made landfall in Florida four times, dumping record amounts of rain.

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