A powerful Category 4 hurricane began tearing through the Eastern Caribbean islands on Monday, making a devastating landfall on Carriacou, a small island north of Grenada, officials said.
Grenada Prime Minister Deacon Mitchell said in a briefing posted on social media that Carriacou was “razed to the ground” in just half an hour, and government officials expected neighboring Petite Martinique to also suffer. “Extreme” destruction.
When Hurricane Beryl made landfall in the first hurricane season of the year, its power left a trail of destruction in its path: trees snapped in half, widespread storm surge and roofs torn by winds exceeding 150 mph. The wind blows away.
Officials said there was no power on any of the islands and communications were difficult.
Mitchell said the full extent of the damage to Carriacou and Petite Martinique would not be clear until Monday evening, adding that he would travel to Carriacou as soon as it was safe to do so.
“There is destruction everywhere,” the prime minister said. “As a result, we anticipate that we will have to quickly transition to a damage assessment, recovery and stabilization model.”
There were also early reports of damage in Grenada’s capital, St. George’s, as the storm passed over the main island. The roof of a police station was ripped off and a hospital’s roof was damaged, forcing patients to be evacuated to lower floors.
Beryl is an anomaly in an already extremely busy storm season, which runs through late November. According to forecasters, this is the third major hurricane on record in the Atlantic in June and the first time a Category 4 hurricane has appeared so early in the season.
“Disbelief doesn’t cut it. This is truly a hurricane. It’s just hell on earth,” Fox 35 Orlando, Florida meteorologist Noah Bergren said on the X show.
This storm is also historic because of the short time it took for it to intensify from a tropical depression to a major hurricane (42 hours), which was a direct result of warmer than average sea surface temperatures. This feat of rapid escalation has only been recorded six times in Atlantic hurricane history.
Barbados officials said on Monday that the island had not been affected by the worst effects of beryl.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley told a national broadcast from the island’s emergency operations center that up to 20 fishing boats may have sunk, including two popular cruisers. But, she added, “it could be worse for us.”
So far, about 40 homes are known to have roof or structural damage, she said, though that number is expected to increase as more than 400 residents return home from shelters.
Over the weekend, people across the Eastern Caribbean had begun preparing for the storm, including those buying last-minute supplies.
“As a family, we cannot take hurricanes lightly,” said Fleur Mathurin, who lives in St. Lucia, where parts of the island are experiencing power outages. “My family, my grandmother, my great-grandfather all lived through hurricanes Allen and Gilbert, and that’s something they always preach to us.”
As of Monday afternoon, the storm was expected to continue moving across the Caribbean, reaching Jamaica on Wednesday and possibly forming into a hurricane, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Julius Gittens contributed reporting from Christ Church, Barbados; Linda Straker in Guyaf, Grenada; Kenton X. Chance in Kingston, St. Vincent; Sharefil Gaillard in Grosse Ile, St. Lucia; and Maria A in Mexico City Bea-Habib.
