Hurricane Beryl is moving toward Jamaica as a powerful Category 4 storm on Wednesday, after flattening homes and devastating agriculture on smaller islands in the eastern Caribbean, leaving at least three people dead.
According to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC), at 0900 GMT, the hurricane was located about 300 kilometers east-southeast of Kingston, the Jamaican capital, with maximum sustained winds of 230 kilometers per hour.
“Beryl is expected to bring life-threatening winds and storm surge to Jamaica on Wednesday and the Cayman Islands on Wednesday night and Thursday,” the NHC said in a statement. A hurricane warning is in effect for both locations.
The NHC also reported that tropical storm conditions were expected in parts of the southern coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, mired in deep-rooted gang violence and an ongoing humanitarian crisis, strong winds caught residents by surprise Tuesday afternoon.
The country’s southwestern peninsula could receive 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cm) of rain, with up to 12 inches in some places, the NHC said. Haiti’s new prime minister, Garry Conille, warned residents to take precautions and stay alert.
The unusually early hurricane, whose rapid strengthening was likely driven by man-made climate change, is expected to remain a hurricane when it passes near Jamaica and the Cayman Islands later this week.
Beryl, the first hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic season and the earliest storm on record to reach the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale, downed power lines and unleashed flash flooding on smaller islands.
Immense destruction
The storm hit Saint Vincent and the Grenadines particularly hard, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said.
“The hurricane came and went, leaving behind immense destruction,” he said. On Union Island, one island in the Grenadines archipelago, 90 percent of homes had been “severely damaged or destroyed,” he said.
The prime minister confirmed one death and said more deaths could be confirmed in the coming days.
In a video briefing on Tuesday, Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell highlighted that Carriacou and Petite Martinique, two of the three islands that make up the country, were the hardest hit by the natural disaster, calling the situation “Armageddon-like.”
“There is no electricity. There is almost complete destruction of houses and buildings,” he said, citing impassable roads due to downed power lines and destroyed fuel stations limiting supplies.
Mitchell said at least two deaths have so far been attributed to Beryl’s impact.
Fallen trees and debris littered streets after the storm, which Mitchell said completely destroyed Carriacou’s mangroves, leaving “literally no vegetation” and destroying the island’s agriculture.
The U.S. Hurricane Center in Miami estimates the massive weather system is moving west-northwest at 35 kph (22 mph).
In Fort-de-France, on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, north of St Vincent, video shared on social media showed flooded streets and locals trying to clear debris.
In addition to Haiti’s southern coast, the NHC also declared a hurricane watch for Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, dotted with beach resorts popular with tourists.
Ahead of the storm’s expected arrival Thursday night, Mexico’s Defense Ministry said the army, air force and national guard had activated emergency response protocols in all three Yucatan states, with 120 shelters open and nearly 4,900 soldiers on duty across the peninsula.
IN PHOTOS I The Caribbean protects itself from the passage of the powerful hurricane Beryl
Meteorological services have warned citizens of the risks posed by Beryl, which made landfall on an island near Grenada as a dangerous Category 4 hurricane. Several Caribbean islands will be affected in its path.
Scientists say the storm’s unusually early timing and rapid intensification are partly due to warmer ocean temperatures.
Climate change likely contributed to Beryl’s early formation and the speed with which it intensified, according to scientists polled by Reuters, potentially providing an eerie preview of future storms.
Global warming has helped push temperatures in the North Atlantic to record levels, said Christopher Rozoff, an atmospheric scientist at the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research. Warmer waters cause more evaporation, which fuels more intense hurricanes with higher wind speeds, he said.
Beryl jumped from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm in less than 10 hours, according to Andra Garner, a meteorologist at Rowan University. This marked the fastest intensification ever recorded before September, the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, she said.
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