Hurricane Beryl was on the verge of making landfall on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as a Category 2 storm on Friday morning after smashing into the eastern Caribbean last week and devastating islands. The storm was expected to make landfall on Friday before emerging into the Gulf of Mexico.
The storm has battered parts of Grenada, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands this week, killing at least eight people. Beryl, which formed as a tropical storm last Friday, briefly strengthened into a Category 5 hurricane, breaking the record for the earliest such storm of the season in the Atlantic.
The storm left destruction in its wake.
Beryl made landfall in Grenada on Monday. Officials said about 98 percent of buildings on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique were damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main medical facility. Crops were destroyed and downed trees and utility poles littered the streets.
“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said.
The storm then headed towards Jamaica, where heavy rains and damaging winds hit the island on Wednesday, making Beryl the strongest storm to approach the island in more than a decade.
The storm blew part of the roof off a passenger boarding bridge at Jamaica’s main airport, and Jamaica’s Minister of Transport, Daryl Vaz, said plans were being prepared to review how the airport would operate while the boarding and arrivals roof was repaired.
Residents of the Cayman Islands are breathing a sigh of relief after Hurricane Beryl passed by without making landfall on Thursday morning as a Category 3 storm. No major damage, injuries or deaths were reported, but officials said they were still assessing the full extent of the storm.
Forecasters expected Mexico to be hit not once but twice by the hurricane, which was expected to move across the Yucatan Peninsula on Friday before crossing the Gulf of Mexico and reaching the coast of the northern state of Tamaulipas.
Mexican authorities remain vigilant as the center predicts a “dangerous” storm surge and hurricane-force winds. The government said Thursday it had deployed more than 13,000 staff and military personnel and rescue dogs and set up mobile kitchens and water treatment plants to the southern Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, which could be among the first to be affected by the storm.
This upcoming hurricane season is expected to be a busy one.
Forecasters are warning that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be much more active than usual.
In late May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted between 17 and 25 named storms would form this year. That’s an “above normal” figure, consistent with more than a dozen predictions made earlier this year by experts from universities, the private sector and government agencies, with an average of 14 named storms produced during the hurricane season.
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