MIAMI, July 14 (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Bertha began to accelerate toward the British colony of Bermuda on Monday, bringing lashing rain and whipping winds to the mid-Atlantic finance center and tourist resort.
The center of what had been for a while the first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic storm season was expected to pass just to the east of Bermuda later on Monday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
By 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), Bertha was located around 75 miles (120 km) southeast of Bermuda and it was moving toward the north-northwest at 8 miles per hour (13 km per hour), the Miami-based center said.
The storm's top sustained winds hovered near 65 mph (100 kph). It was expected to dump up to 5 inches (12.7 cm) of rain on Bermuda.
At one point a "major" Category 3 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, Bertha weakened as it churned up colder waters from beneath the sea surface, depriving it of the warm water that fuels tropical storms.
Wealthy Bermuda, home to much of the world's reinsurance industry, has some of the region's toughest building standards and a tropical storm is unlikely to pose a serious threat to its 66,000 people.
Oil markets have paid close attention to Atlantic storms since a series of powerful hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 toppled oil rigs and severed gas pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, where the United States gets a third of its domestic crude supply.
An area of disturbed weather midway between the Caribbean islands and Africa was of more interest to oil traders on Monday than Bertha.
That area of low pressure located around 1,400 miles (2,270 km) east of the Lesser Antilles was getting better organized and could become a tropical depression, the precursor to a tropical storm, later on Monday, the hurricane center said.
It was moving westward at 10 to 15 mph (16 to 24 kph), the center said.
Bertha formed near the Cape Verde Islands off Africa.
Its development that far east so early in the hurricane season is viewed by some experts as ominous. The six-month-long Atlantic storm season, which begins on June 1, rarely gets into high gear before August.
(Reporting by Michael Christie, Editing by Eric Beech)