Bermuda reinsurance companies are often on the line when catastrophe strikes, particularly when hurricanes hit the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. As much as 60 percent of the world's insured real estate is on one US coast or the other.

So news that a new era of intense hurricane activity is about to unfold, according to one of the world's leading experts on such matters, will be of intense interest to Bermuda's insurance industry.

William Gray of Colorado State University, one of the most prominent hurricane forecasters, announced last week that, in the new era, the Caribbean islands, the East Coast of the United States and the Florida peninsula are likely to be hit more than ever.

The last intense era of hurricane activity ended in the 1960s, Mr. Gray said, when Florida and the East Coast were not nearly so extensively developed.

During the relatively quiet period that stretched from 1970 to 1994, more people were lured to the shoreline, and many more homes and businesses in prime waterfront locations are in jeopardy today, Mr. Gray has concluded.

"If this new period of increased landfalling storms is now with us, it could pose serious threats to safety and to property for the country,'' Mr. Gray said.

The reasons for the renewed activity involve several "climate signals'' that have been reliable indicators in the past, he said, including above-average sea temperatures in the North Atlantic and above-average rainfall in Africa.

For the past two busy seasons, the presence of La Nina, the mass of cold water in the eastern equatorial Pacific, has kept at bay the wind shear that helps to weaken strong hurricanes.

As evidence that this new era could already be under way, Mr. Gray pointed out that during the five-year period from 1990 to 1994, there were only five major storms in the Atlantic and Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico with wind speeds that exceeded 110 mph, or ranked as Categories three, four or five on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

During the past five seasons, there have been 20 such storms, a fourfold increase.

For the hurricane season which officially ended the end of November, no one can fault Mr. Gray's degree of accuracy. Earlier this year, he predicted there would be 14 named storms in 1999, nine of them hurricanes. Four of those hurricanes would be intense, he predicted.

The final count for the season was 12 named storms, with eight qualifying as hurricanes.

Five of those hurricanes were major.

Specialist Jack Beven of the National Hurricane Centre applauded Mr. Gray's accuracy this season.

"We put in a lot of overtime this season,'' Mr. Beven said. "The season did have some meteorological quirks.'' It began with tropical storm Arlene in June, which formed in an unusual position for so early in the season, southeast of Bermuda, and ended with Lenny in mid-November, which made an eastward track through the Caribbean that had not been seen in a storm so late in the season since record-keeping began in 1886, Mr. Beven said.

Floyd was the strongest, topping out at 155 m.p.h. when it was east of the Bahamas, and later spawning the largest mass evacuation in US history, as it raked the East Coast.

Flooding brought by its heavy rains produced the costliest disaster in North Carolina history, estimated at more than $2 billion.

Intensifying: This summer's ferocious Hurricane Floyd on September 13, swirling near the Caribbean island and Florida.