overturned yachts and destroyed crops in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. But it killed only three people.

The same storm proceeded to devastate neighbouring Dominican Republic and Haiti, killing more than 500 and laying waste to entire areas.

The difference is money and the organisation it enables.

Eight months later, with experts predicting an even more dangerous hurricane season, little has changed.

Last year, the relatively prosperous U.S. territories began preparing two days before Georges hit. People flocked to stores, buying candles, flashlight batteries, water, canned food and wooden boards to protect glass windows. In Puerto Rico, thousands sought shelter on higher ground and abandoned unstable homes to ride out the storm in concrete schools.

Across the Mona Passage on the island of Hispaniola, officials of the Dominican Republic opened some shelters only after Georges was already hammering streets with blankets of rain and its 110 mph winds were ripping off corrugated iron roofs and hurling debris through the air.

Impoverished and hapless, neighbouring Haiti organised no shelters and civil defence officials mobilised only after the hurricane. Haitian radio stations broadcast warnings as Georges bore down -- but only 280,000 of the 7 million people have a radio.

Since then some have been helped by foreign aid, with Dominican baseball star Sammy Sosa alone collecting more aid in the US than the Dominican government could muster. But destroyed neighbourhoods remain in ruins, and thousands are still homeless.

By contrast, in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency embarked on its most expensive rescue project to date, including a dollars 1.2 billion, five-year plan to build 50,000 homes.

FEMA director James Lee Witt said the US Virgin Islands escaped Georges virtually unscathed largely because of the construction of stronger homes and utility poles under stricter building codes adopted after hurricanes devastated those islands in 1989 and 1995-1996.

Corrugated iron roofs were replaced with concrete and walls were reinforced with metal struts, as they will be in Puerto Rico.

Virgin Islanders who had complained about the expense of the new codes marvelled over what some called a miraculous escape.

FEMA -- which spent dollars 321 million in the Virgin Islands after 1989's Hugo -- needed only dollars 6 million to repair damage from Georges.

"The Virgin Islands' people prepared for the worst and came out on top,'' Witt said.

In the Dominican Republic, authorities still insist they were not negligent last year, though meteorologists contend officials in their department and the Civil Defense failed to warn the 8 million people of the storm's magnitude.

The Dominican government has put the death toll at 283, though legislators have alleged the toll was far higher, and that many bodies were carried out to sea.

The town of San Cristobal, just east of Santo Domingo, was swamped by roof-high floodwaters from the Nizao River that killed several people who sought shelter in a school.

Civil Defence director Carlos Paulino said his department was now working on a contingency plan that would include an education campaign on preventing storm damage through radio, TV and schools.

In Haiti, civil defence officer Odonel Policard insisted authorities have "learned from last year.'' Policard said officials were drawing up contingency plans this month, though it seems unlikely that any message will reach isolated rural populations in the short time available.

Georges killed 221 people in Haiti, most in mud slides and floods. Half the deaths occurred in eastern Fonds Verrettes, a border town wiped off the map by flashfloods. Nothing has been rebuilt.

In central Haiti, the floodgates of an overflowing hydroelectric dam at Lake Peligre were opened belatedly and without warning, destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and homes. Dam engineers had warned the Public Works Ministry of the danger three days before, to no avail. It's not known how many died in the flood.

Since then, Haitian victims who received no government help have rebuilt flimsy shacks made of light boards and zinc sheets of the kind Georges shredded with ease. Poor people often also squat on riverside land and in ravines prone to flashfloods.

In Puerto Rico, architect Evelio Pina can afford the luxury of aesthetics -- hurricane-resistant homes with sloping roofs of steel columns, beams and concrete.

"We want to change the low-income housing matchbox model with almost no windows and flat roofs ... for a house that's more attractive, with a little more dignity,'' Pina said.

In the US, Princeton University researchers reported recently that the costs of natural catastrophes have skyrocketed because the wealthy are moving to vulnerable beach-view and wetland areas, including hurricane-prone Florida, Maryland, North Carolina and Texas.

"The truth is, we see too many families suffering from damages that could have been prevented,'' said Witt. "We mourn the lives that could have been saved and despair at the devastation of communities that could have been protected.'' Honourable Mention : Olivia French, age 7, painted this with the following caption: "Help! Says brain coral. I'm getting seasick.'' Miss French attends the Montessori Academy.

HURRICANES HUR