Jamaica is enduring a near-direct strike from Category 4 Hurricane Beryl on Wednesday, after the record-breaking storm left multiple people dead on islands in the eastern Caribbean.
The core of the “extremely dangerous” hurricane will move just south of the Cayman Islands Wednesday night and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is in its path late Thursday night and Friday, the National Hurricane Center said. The Gulf coast of Texas, including Corpus Christi, was in Beryl’s forecast cone of probability for late in the weekend.
While Beryl will weaken in the coming days, it is still expected to be a major hurricane or nearly a major hurricane when it passes the Cayman Islands Wednesday night and will remain a hurricane until it makes landfall in the Yucatan Peninsula, the hurricane center said.
Hurricane Beryl could bring life-threatening storm surge from 6 to 9 feet, flash flooding and mudslides to Jamaica and Haiti, and officials warned residents to take shelter or evacuate the most prone areas.
As of 8 p.m. Wednesday, Beryl was 100 miles west of Kingston, Jamaica, paralleling the southern coast of the island, with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph. The hurricane is traveling west-northwest at 20 mph.
Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 45 miles from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 185 miles. The hurricane center warned that wind speeds on the windward sides of hills and mountains can be as much as 30% stronger than those at the ocean’s surface.
The Cayman Islands could see between 2 and 4 feet of storm surge. Though Haiti and the Dominican Republic are not in the direct path of Beryl, the hurricane is close enough to bring 4 to 6 inches of rain to Haiti’s southern coast and possibly create flash floods and mudslides, the hurricane center said.
In Kingston, people boarded up windows, fishermen pulled their boats out of the water and workers dismantled roadside advertising boards to protect them from the lashing winds.
Kingston resident Pauline Lynch said that she had stockpiled food and water in anticipation of the storm’s arrival. With wind already whipping a light rain, Lynch said, “I have no control over what is coming so I just have to pray that all people of Jamaica is safe and we don’t suffer no deaths, no loss.”
By midday Wednesday, winds howled in the capital, turning the sea into churning whitecaps as Beryl’s eye scraped by the island’s southern coast.
Wind-whipped rain pounded the island for hours as residents heeded authorities’ call to shelter until the storm had passed. Power was knocked out in much of the capital.
Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness said on Wednesday afternoon that nearly 500 people were placed in shelters.
Jamaica was under a state of emergency as the island was declared a disaster zone hours before the impact of Hurricane Beryl.
Holness said that the disaster zone declaration will remain for the next seven days.
Beyond Jamaica
Beryl’s eyewall was tracking near southwestern Jamaica by Wednesday night and will track near the Cayman Islands late into the night before approaching the Yucatan Peninsula just south of Tulum and Cancun as a weaker hurricane on Thursday night.
Mexico has issued a hurricane warning for the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, from Puerto Costa Maya near the Belize border north to Cancun and a tropical storm warning from Cabo Catoche to Progresso in the Yucatan Peninsula.
By Friday night, Beryl is forecast to move over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico and turn northwest. Forecasters said Beryl should weaken into a tropical storm while crossing the Yucatan but could regain hurricane strength while back over the Gulf of Mexico.
The head of Mexico’s civil defense agency said that Beryl is expected to make a rare double strike on Mexico. Laura Velázquez said the hurricane is expected to make landfall between late Thursday and early Friday along a relatively unpopulated stretch of the Caribbean coast between Tulum and the inland town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto.
The hurricane is expected to weaken to a tropical storm as it crosses the Yucatan peninsula and reemerge over the weekend at storm strength into the Gulf of Mexico. Velázquez said that Beryl is then expected to hit Mexican territory a second time in the Gulf coast states of Veracruz or Tamaulipas, near the Texas border.
The southern half of Texas’ Gulf Coast was in the forecast cone of uncertainty as of Wednesday night.
Record-breaking storm
Late Monday, Beryl became the earliest storm to develop into a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic and peaked at winds of 165 mph Tuesday before weakening to a still-destructive Category 4.
It was the first Category 4 storm to occur in June and the earliest Category 4 on record in the Atlantic Basin.
The storm strengthened from a tropical depression to a major hurricane in just 42 hours, which only six other Atlantic hurricanes have done, and never before September, according to hurricane expert Sam Lillo.
Beryl made landfall Monday in the Grenadine Islands north of Grenada as a powerful Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 155 mph, just shy of the minimum Category 5 threshold of 157 mph.
At least seven people have died.
Three people were reported killed in Grenada and Carriacou and another in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, officials said. Two other deaths were reported in northern Venezuela, where five people were missing, officials said.
One death in Grenada happened after a tree fell on a house, Kerryne James, minister of climate resilience, environment and renewable energy, told The Associated Press.
Next storm being tracked
The National Hurricane Center also is keeping an eye on a tropical wave over the southeastern Caribbean Sea that could become a tropical depression, though any development would happen slowly.
As of 8 p.m. Wednesday, forecasters gave it a 10% chance of developing in the next two days and a 20% chance over the next week.
It is expected to move west-northwest at 20 mph to 25 mph across the Caribbean over the next few days, forecasters said.
If it develops, it would be named Debby and follow a very similar path as Hurricane Beryl into the Caribbean Sea.
Information from The Associated Press was used to supplement this report.
