devastating storms in the near future.

Director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Dr. Robert Sheets predicts hurricanes worse than Hurricane Andrew which devastated Florida last year and Hurricane Emily which struck Bermuda in 1987.

Dr. Sheets is predicting a "nightmare'' that could kill many people and cause millions of dollars worth of damage. He fears future storms could conceivably bankrupt the US insurance industry.

The doomsday scenario was designed to spur more research, evacuation planning and better building codes to protect against devastating storms such as Hurricane Andrew in the US.

Dr. Sheets said if the westerly moving Andrew, which caused some $25 billion in damage last August in south Florida, had edged northward just 20 miles it would have created a "nightmare storm.'' In that case, he said, it would have put New Orleans about 20 feet under water. Total property damage could have been far over $100 billion.

The Florida insurance commissioner told him, he said, that ''if New Orleans had been struck, the nation's insurance industry would have been bankrupt, and it is reasonable to assume that losses from rising waters would far exceed the reserves of the federal flood insurance programme.'' Andrew represented, he said, the largest economic loss from a natural disaster in US history. Since that storm eight insurance companies have failed and major problems lie ahead for getting insurance in all coastal areas.

While in the 1970s and 1980s there were fewer hurricanes than in earlier years, Sheets told the National Press Club, but research indicates hurricane frequency "is likely to return, sometime in the near future,'' like those of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

In that period Bermuda was hit by Hurricane Edna and Hurricane Arlene, although there were a number of near misses.