By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 26, 1998; Page A3

KEY WEST, Fla., Sept. 25—After a killing spree in the Caribbean that left at least 230 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, Hurricane Georges whipped across the Florida Keys today, cutting off power on the vulnerable island chain but inflicting relatively little damage and causing no reported deaths among the diehards who refused mandatory evacuation orders.

Surrounded by sustained winds of 90 mph and gusts reaching 105 mph -- making a comparatively weak Category 1 hurricane -- Georges's wobbly eye passed about noon over the southernmost island, Key West, before continuing on a west-northwesterly track over the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted some strengthening over the open, warm water and a course that could take the storm anywhere from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle over the weekend.

"We're concerned about areas of Louisiana and eastward," said Jerry Jarrell, director of the National Hurricane Center. "Almost anyone in those areas should be paying close attention to this system."

Emergency officials in Louisiana, Mississippi, and northern Florida began bracing for their turn at handling the storm.

In the brief, relatively calm eye of the hurricane, residents rushed out to the streets to survey the damage here in Key West, which included mostly downed trees and power lines. On Key West's "Houseboat Row," however, several floating homes were destroyed, smashed against the seawall. Others were listing and waterlogged. But structures on land -- including the old, historic homes where Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams lived, worked and drank -- were sound.

As afternoon turned to night and the trailing edge of the hurricane rushed in, heavy bands of and hurricane-force winds battered the Keys a second time. Some streets here filled with rising water and debris. Several distress calls were heard on a marine band radio from sailors attempting to ride it out at anchor near the shore.

Callers to US1 Radio, the only station broadcasting here today, reported roofs blown off and other severe damage to homes in the lower Keys. Several callers reported at least a foot of water in their houses.

Farther north, from Miami's South Beach to Orlando's Disney World, motels and shelters were filled by more than 1 million people who had fled the storm, heeding warnings from official forecasters and reacting to relentless footage from television reporters in tense standups with the wind in their hair. But the intense winds did not come to the populated areas. Instead, they passed further south, through the Keys and then out to the Gulf of Mexico.

Gray skies hovered above Miami throughout the morning. Even at the edge of the storm, powerful winds cut through the tops of palm trees, in some cases snapping branches that lay in deserted, wind-whipped streets. The morning remained relatively dry. But sporadic afternoon downpours that ended as suddenly as they had begun kept most people on guard. The wind was relentless throughout much of the morning and early afternoon, downing power lines and bringing the city to a cautious standstill. Authorities reported more than 100,000 homes in South Florida were without power.

As the afternoon wore on, however, some residents of the Miami area who stayed overnight in shelters began returning to their homes. Citing the possibility of tornadoes, city and state authorities asked people to stay indoors until further notice. In fact, authorities reported two tornadoes in the Miami-Dade area overnight but reported no deaths or severe damage.

President Clinton declared a state of emergency in 17 Florida counties and authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate relief efforts.

By afternoon, emergency crews in Miami-Dade had begun cleanup, local airports resumed flights, and motorists slowly took to the roads. And television stations, which had aired nonstop hurricane coverage throughout the night, resumed regular programming.

"It's a major relief," said Miami's mayor, Joe Carollo. "We obviously didn't need the major damage problems and the financial worries that a major hurricane would bring."

Georges was the first major hurricane to strike South Florida since Andrew, which in 1992 caused a record-smashing $25 billion damage and killed 26 people in the United States. Georges was a very different hurricane. It was filled with lashing horizontal rain along with the high winds but seemed meek compared with Andrew, which left hundreds of square miles of south Miami-Dade County looking like bombed-out wasteland.

"This ain't so bad at all," said Juan Caldera as he briefly surveyed the damage on Key West's famous party road, Duval Street, which was blocked by a large tree. "We were lucky, my friend. This is a pussycat compared to what could have happened."

Besides facing lesser winds, the residents of South Florida appear to have learned Andrew's lessons. Officials ordered mobile homes evacuated in Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, and people kept a wary eye on the storm hour by hour.

The scene here in the Florida Keys was a world away from the death and destruction visited upon the Caribbean islands to the south, where hundreds of mostly poor and unprepared citizens perished, killed mostly by lethal mudslides and flash floods, and where they rode out the storm in flimsy structures that blew apart.

In Haiti, officials raised the death toll to 87, up from 42 on Thursday, and the count is expected to mount as rescue workers reach isolated areas. According to the Associated Press in Haiti, civil protection officials said 18,000 were left homeless and at least 34 people were still missing.

Haiti's neighboring nation on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, counted at least 125 dead, and some reports said that number too was expected to rise. Some 100,000 Dominicans were left homeless.

In Puerto Rico, police said the storm killed at least 11 people and the governor of the U.S. commonwealth estimated damages reaching $1 billion.

According to still sketchy press reports from the islands, four people were reported dead in St. Kitts and two in Antigua and Barbuda. In Cuba, three died as Georges passed over Thursday.

Authorities in the Florida Keys had been most worried about a storm surge, which could have pushed seas between three and five feet above high tides. The leading edge of hurricane struck at high tide in most of the Florida Keys, but it was the trailing edge -- behind the calm eye -- that most concerned forecasters.

Staff writer John W. Fountain in Miami contributed to this report.