Devastated by Hurricane Ivan last September, the tiny spice island of Grenada, home to 90,000 people, suffered more damage to houses, buildings and infrastructure, officials said. No deaths were reported.

The operating theater at Grenada's general hospital and the hospital on the neighboring island of Carriacou lost parts of their roofs to Emily.

"What we have is an additional burden on the country at this time and which the country can least afford at this particular time," Grenada's Prime Minister Keith Mitchell said in a television appearance monitored in Trinidad.

Ivan inflicted $2.2 billion in damage on Grenada, double the annual economic output of the island, which is one of the world's leading producers of nutmeg. Ninety percent of its peoples' homes were damaged or destroyed.

"Persons whose houses were not properly repaired (after Ivan), these houses again suffered damage," said legislator Kenneth Fullerton, who estimated that less than 50 percent of homes and businesses damaged by Ivan had been rebuilt.

In energy-rich Trinidad and Tobago, two houses collapsed and a dozen lost roofs. Emily flooded roads, toppled trees and knocked out power.

Trinidad's Atlantic LNG, the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to the United States, did not suffer any disruption to its operations from the storm, a company official said.

Emily temporarily delayed oil tankers from sailing as it skirted Venezuela's north coast but did not disrupt operations at the 200,000-barrel-per-day Puerto La Cruz refinery, officials said.

At 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), the center of Emily was about 445 miles (715 km) southeast of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and moving to the west-northwest at about 21 mph (34 kph), the US National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

The storm grew rapidly. Sustained winds climbed from 60 mph (97 kph) on Wednesday afternoon to 115 mph (185 kph) 24 hours later and forecasters said they expected the storm to strengthen further in the next day or so.

The hurricane center's long-range forecast had Emily racing across the Caribbean Sea north of the Netherlands Antilles over the next two days. It would skirt Jamaica's south coast on Saturday and hit Mexico's Yucatan peninsula on Sunday.

Storm warnings were in effect for the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao and the northern coast of Venezuela from Pedernales to Punto Fijo, as well as Jamaica and parts of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Hurricane Dennis killed at least 44 people in Haiti last week during a trek through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico in which at least 70 people died. The toll included 16 in Cuba, one in Jamaica and 10 in the United States.