US climatologists said that Caribbean and US coastlines were under greater threat in this year's Atlantic tropical storm season, with five out of nine projected hurricanes expected to rank as intense storms.
"There's a little bit of anticipation and a little bit of nerves," Melissa Holt, of Coconut Creek, Florida told The Miami Herald.
University of Colorado climate experts, Philip Klotzbach and William Gray, said there was an above-average risk of a major hurricane landfall in the Caribbean Sea, and that the US east coast was under a much higher-than-average risk of being struck.
Mr Klotzbach and Mr Gray said they expected in all 17 tropical storms to be generated during the Atlantic season, including nine hurricanes.
Little protection
The researchers said five hurricanes are likely to become "intense" storms, those classified as Class 3 or higher on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale.
Hurricane Katrina ranked as category three on the five-point scale when it slammed ashore near New Orleans, causing the deaths of more than 1,300 people.
Level three storms on the scale have driving winds of at least 178 kilometres per hour, capable of knocking down large trees and destroying mobile homes.
The two said the possibility of a hurricane strike on the US east coast, including Florida, was 69 percent.
Some 100,000 people whose homes were destroyed or severely damaged are still living in mobile homes or trailers, which offer little protection from a hurricane's destructive fury.
And authorities admit they have not finished strengthening the levees that broke after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast on August 29, 2005, flooding large parts of New Orleans.
In New Orleans, where thousands of people were trapped in the flooded city after failing to follow evacuation orders, authorities plan to use planes, trains and buses to get residents out should a hurricane threaten.