LIVE – Hurricane Beryl: the worst storm in its category sweeps the Antilles and gains in intensity

Beryl is the first hurricane of the season in the Atlantic. A weather event of this scale is extremely rare this early in the hurricane season, which runs from early June to late November in the United States. “Only five major hurricanes (force 3 or greater) have been recorded in the Atlantic before the first week of July,” hurricane expert Michael Lowry told X. By becoming the sixth, Beryl is also “the earliest on record this far east.”

One of the parameters that explains Beryl’s intensity is the current temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, which has been overheating for many months. Warm water is indeed an important fuel for hurricanes, and, according to a researcher at CSU Tropical Weather and Climate Research in the United States, the current temperature of the Caribbean Sea is equivalent to that normally recorded for the month of September.

Barbados appears to have escaped the worst of the storm, although high winds and rain continued to batter the territory, with no casualties so far. It appears to have been a “narrow escape,” Interior and Information Minister Wilfred Abrahams said in a video, although gusts of wind were still expected. Homes and businesses were flooded and fishing boats damaged in Bridgetown.

On the French island of Martinique, which is on tropical storm alert, as are the south of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the wind has strengthened since Sunday afternoon, with occasional heavy downpours, but not exceptional, according to AFP correspondents on the ground. Some 10,000 customers have been without electricity in Martinique in various municipalities, according to EDF.

Before being upgraded to Category 5, Beryl’s eye hit Carriacou, a small island in Grenada known for its beauty, on Monday at 11:10 a.m. local time (3:10 p.m. GMT) with destructive winds measured at up to 150 mph. “In half an hour, Carriacou was flattened,” Grenadian Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell announced at a press briefing on Monday. “We are not out of the woods,” he added. While no deaths were immediately reported, he said he could not say “with certainty that no one was injured or killed because of the hurricane.”

Beryl is expected to “still be close to major hurricane intensity” with winds of up to 260 km/h in the coming hours and while it could continue its trajectory to Jamaica, which it should reach on Wednesday, the NHC warned. Since 21:00 GMT yesterday, the country has been placed on hurricane watch.

Beryl, which is sweeping several islands in the southeastern Caribbean with devastating rains and extreme winds, has gained further intensity, the American National Hurricane Center (NHC) said early this morning, a few hours after raising the phenomenon to Category 5, the highest on the weather scale. Beryl “is gaining further intensity,” the NHC said in its first bulletin for the day on Tuesday, and winds have strengthened to reach nearly 270 kilometers per hour.

On the Saffir-Simpson scale, used to describe the intensity of storms, Category 5 is the strongest, corresponding to winds greater than 252 km/h, with “potentially catastrophic” effects. Around 11 p.m. local time Monday (0300 GMT), the NHC announced that Beryl was moving to Category 5, becoming the earliest of such intensity ever recorded in the Atlantic.