Hurricane Beryl, which made particularly early landfall, is moving through the Caribbean on Tuesday after causing significant damage and at least five deaths, and is preparing to hit Jamaica on Wednesday, the American Hurricane Center (NHC) warns.
Although relegated to category 4 on Tuesday afternoon, this first hurricane of the season was, on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, classified as category 5, the highest with winds exceeding 252 km/h and “potentially catastrophic” effects.
Beryl was the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded by the U.S. weather service.
“Damaging winds…, life-threatening rising sea levels and destructive waves are expected in parts of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Wednesday and Wednesday night,” the NHC wrote in its 2100 GMT bulletin on Tuesday, noting winds of 250 km/h in the hurricane.
“The good news is that Beryl has started to weaken a little bit,” said NHC Director Michael Brennan, calling the hurricane “extremely dangerous.”
Beryl could hit Jamaica as a Category 3 or 4 storm, “with the potential for catastrophic wind damage, widespread damage to homes, roofs, trees, power lines,” he added.
“In Jamaica, you need to be in your safe place by nightfall and be prepared to shelter in place all day Wednesday,” Brennan said.
Beryl will also hit southern Haiti and reach, weakened, the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, on Thursday evening.
– Desolation in the Antilles –
Before hitting these islands, the eye of the hurricane devastated Carriacou, an island of Grenada known for its beauty, as well as other territories in the region, on Monday.
Two people were killed in Carriacou and another on the neighbouring island of Grenada, the main one in the small archipelago, Grenadian Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said. Winds of up to 240 km/h were measured in Carriacou, which was “flattened in half an hour”, he said.
“It is clear that the climate crisis is pushing disasters to new record levels of destruction,” observed UN Climate Change chief Simon Stiell, whose family is among the victims in Carriacou.
“The climate crisis is getting worse, and faster than expected,” requiring “much more ambitious climate action from governments and businesses” in response, he added in a statement to AFP.
In the neighbouring archipelago of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Beryl has caused devastation and left at least one person dead, according to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves.
“Unfortunately, there is one person killed. There could be more victims, we are not sure,” he added in a video on Facebook, and “90% of the homes were badly damaged or destroyed on one of the islands where the airport roof was torn off.”
In Barbados, homes and businesses were flooded and fishing boats damaged in Bridgetown.
On the French island of Martinique, streets were flooded and some 10,000 customers were left without power, according to supplier EDF.
In Venezuela, a man died after being swept away by the current of a flooded river in the small town of Cumanacoa, near the coast, an official source said.
– North Atlantic overheating –
Beryl is the first hurricane of the season in the Atlantic. A weather event of this scale is extremely rare so early in the hurricane season, which runs from early June to late November in the United States.
The American meteorological observatory (NOAA) had predicted at the end of May an extraordinary season and the possibility of four to seven hurricanes of category 3 or more.
These forecasts are linked in particular to the expected development of the La Nina weather phenomenon, as well as to the very high temperatures of the Atlantic Ocean, according to NOAA. Temperatures in the North Atlantic have been evolving continuously for more than a year at record levels of heat, well above the annals.
