Flooding had already begun on the eastern end of the island, and many residents had evacuated their homes. The maximum sustained winds in the eyewall were estimated at 140 mph, making Beryl a Category 4 hurricane. In Kingston, winds had recently gusted to 81 mph.
The storm first hit Grenada, St. Vincent and other Caribbean islands on Monday, leaving behind widespread destruction and killing at least four. In Jamaica, “devastating hurricane-force winds, life-threatening storm surge, and damaging waves” were on the way, the National Hurricane Center warned. If the storm makes landfall, Beryl could be the strongest hurricane to do so in Jamaica since Gilbert in 1988.
Beryl is only the first hurricane of the 2024 season and became the earliest-forming Category 5 on record in the Atlantic. Its early arrival marks the start of what forecasters have predicted will be a particularly busy hurricane season.
“This is almost like a game changer,” said Oliver Mair, Jamaica’s consul general in Miami. “To have this size hurricane so early in the season, it’s frightening.”
Beryl was expected to weaken some but still be “at or near major hurricane intensity” when its center passes near or over Jamaica. Even if Beryl’s center doesn’t make landfall, onshore winds along Jamaica’s south coast could drive a serious storm surge of 6 to 9 feet. Hurricane warnings are in effect there and in the Cayman Islands, where Beryl is expected to approach Wednesday night into Thursday.
As the storm closed in, Jamaica ordered evacuations, and Prime Minister Andrew Holness urged residents under those orders and in any low-lying areas to head to shelters before conditions deteriorated.
A 24-hour curfew was put in place at 6 a.m. Wednesday, Mair said. He cited a “very good response” to the call to evacuate, saying Jamaicans were taking the storm’s threat seriously upon hearing of the destruction on other islands. By early afternoon, heavy flooding had already begun on the eastern end of the island, he said.
“Though we have prayed for the best, we know that there will be some level of damage,” Mair told The Washington Post. “There has been a big effort to move individuals from low-lying, flood-prone regions to shelters.”
Hard-hit islands assess the destruction
The hurricane continues to move west after making landfall Monday on Grenada’s Carriacou Island. Meanwhile, the battered islands in Beryl’s wake were beginning to assess the damage.
Grenadian officials said at a news conference late Tuesday that nearly 98 percent of homes and buildings on the hard-hit islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique are either damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s Princess Royal Hospital and its airport. The electrical grid is mostly destroyed, they said, making communications difficult, if not impossible.
Grenadian Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell, who visited Carriacou on Monday, said the hurricane has left the people of Carriacou and Petite Martinique “light-years behind.”
“It is almost Armageddon-like, almost total damage or destruction of all buildings, whether they be public buildings, homes or other private facilities,” he said. “Complete devastation and destruction of agriculture, complete and total destruction of the natural environment. There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou.”
At a separate news conference in Florida on Tuesday, Dianne Perrotte, Grenada’s deputy consul general in Miami, said the islands are looking for donations of mattresses, sleeping bags, food and other supplies, as the airports slowly reopen for aid flights.
Grenadian officials have said at least three people were killed by the hurricane. In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves also reported severe damage and at least one death. Most homes on Union Island were destroyed, Gonsalves said, saying, “Basically, an entire island with 2,500 people is homeless.”
In Barbados, hundreds of people went to shelters, and at least dozens of houses were significantly impacted, said Rudy Grant, consul general of Barbados in Miami. Many businesses were hit in the fishing town of Oistins, a tourist destination, he said, and the port in the capital, Bridgetown, was closed until debris was cleared out.
Aid groups were preparing to send shipments to the Caribbean as soon as possible. Global Empowerment Mission, a Florida-based nonprofit, was working with community organizations to pack boxes with food and emergency and hygiene supplies in Florida on Wednesday.
The group was collecting donations and planned to send its first shipments Thursday to St. Vincent, said president Michael Capponi, with shipments to Jamaica to follow later.
The last storm to reach Category 5 strength early in the season was Hurricane Emily on July 17, 2005. Beryl broke that record and was also the farthest-south Category 4 storm on record when it intensified over the weekend — and the most quickly strengthening storm observed in the Atlantic anytime before September. It lurched from a tropical depression to a Category 4 in just 48 hours.
While favorable meteorological conditions — such as weak upper-level winds, the presence of a tropical wave and divergence, or spreading of air aloft — all combined to create the storm, its intensity is to some extent linked to our changing climate.
Water temperatures, which are running 3 or 4 degrees above average, are more reminiscent of early September than late June or early July. That has fueled Beryl’s exceptional intensity and breakneck strengthening, and it fits into a well-researched pattern of more intense and more rapidly intensifying hurricanes.
“We are no longer prepared to accept that it’s okay for us to constantly suffer significant, clearly demonstrated loss and damage arising from climatic events,” said Mitchell, the Grenadian prime minister, “and be expected to rebuild, be expected to borrow … year after year while the countries that are responsible for creating this situation and exacerbating this situation sit idly by with platitudes.”
“The impact of climate change and these weather events — they are getting more and more frequent and the consequences that much graver,” said Darrel Montrope, St. Lucia’s consul general in Miami. He said he anticipated ongoing aid needs in the Caribbean throughout the coming hurricane season.
Meanwhile, hurricane watches have been issued along the east coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula from Chetumal to Cabo Catoche. Beryl could hit the area Thursday night or early Friday before emerging over the Bay of Campeche or the Gulf of Mexico this weekend. Tropical-storm conditions are expected in the Yucatán and are possible along parts of the Belize coast by Thursday into Friday.
From there, forecasts are more uncertain, with numerous possibilities for Beryl’s future track.
If Beryl is a weak system, it will be inclined to continue heading west, probably making landfall over the weekend in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state. If Beryl remains stronger, however, which would be the result of a briefer interaction with the Yucatán, then it could take a more northerly track over the western Gulf of Mexico.
If the latter scenario occurs, the storm could strengthen and perhaps rapidly intensify Saturday into Sunday, fueled by very warm sea surface temperatures. The threat of a landfall in Texas is a very real possibility, though Mexico remains more likely.
Though Beryl was some 1,800 miles from the southern Texas coast, officials in Willacy County, near the Mexican border, were already preparing for the worst.
That included readying relief supplies and search-and-rescue teams, and urging residents to pack bags and ensure they have enough food and water to last as much as 72 hours, said Frank Torres, the county’s emergency management coordinator.
As a coastal county with hundreds of homes right on the Gulf of Mexico, Willacy County will issue evacuation orders if it appears Beryl is on track to strike as a Category 2 storm or stronger by Sunday, Torres said.
“We have to take the mentality that it’s going to hit us,” he said. “If there’s the slightest possibility that it’s going to hit us, we just have to act as if we’re going to be ground zero.”