Tropical Storm Colin Reforms, Heads for Bermuda

Tropical Storm Colin reformed over the Atlantic Ocean Thursday and was moving northwest on a path that could take it close to Bermuda, where authorities issued a tropical storm warning, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Two days earlier, it had become the third named storm of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, but had then weakened again to a tropical depression.

The Miami-based hurricane center said Colin now had top sustained winds of 45 miles per hour.

“Satellite imagery and reports from an Air Force Reserve hurricane hunter aircraft indicate that the remnants of Colin have developed sufficient organized convection and a well-enough defined center of circulation to again be designated a tropical cyclone,” the center said.

It said the small island of Bermuda, a British overseas territory that is a center for the global insurance industry, was expected to feel tropical storm-force winds within the next 36 hours.

On its current path, the storm was expected to stay far away from the Gulf of Mexico, where U.S. oil and natural gas operations are concentrated and where BP Plc is working to permanently seal a ruptured oil well that caused the world’s worst offshore spill.

(Reporting by Pascal Fletcher, editing by Cynthia Osterman)