HURRICANE BERYL STRENGTHENS TO ‘CATASTROPHIC’ CATEGORY 5
Hurricane Beryl has intensified into a category 5 storm as it barrels towards Jamaica after wreaking havoc across the eastern Caribbean.
The first hurricane of the season and the earliest top-level storm in the Atlantic on record, Beryl is still gathering strength as it reaches winds of up to 165mph.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said late on Monday that Beryl had become a “potentially catastrophic” category 5 hurricane and forecast “life-threatening winds and storm surge” in Jamaica with the potential for flash floods.
In the NHC’s update early on Tuesday, it said Beryl was “still intensifying”.
The storm ripped doors, windows and roofs off homes as it tore through Grenada, Barbados, Tobago, St Vincent and Grenadines and St Lucia on Monday, killing at least one.
Grenada’s Carriacou Island took a direct hit from the storm’s “extremely dangerous eyewall” with sustained winds at upwards of 150 mph, the NHC said.
“In half an hour, Carriacou was flattened,” Dickon Mitchell, Grenada’s prime minister, said, adding: “We are not yet out of the woods.”
Streets from St Lucia island south to Grenada were strewn with shoes, fallen trees, downed power lines and cows lay dead in fields.
“Right now, I’m real heartbroken,” said Vichelle Clark King as she stared at her flooded shop in Bridgetown, Barbados.
Beryl is only the second category 5 storm to be recorded in July since 2005 and the earliest storm to rapidly intensify from an unnamed depression into a category 4 in just 48 hours.
Scientists said the storm was fuelled by unprecedentedly warm sea temperatures.
“This is sort of our worst scenario… We’re starting early, some very severe storms,” Kristen Corbosiero, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, said.
Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, called Beryl “not just a one off” but a harbinger of greater threats to come in the 2024 hurricane season.
2024-07-02T08:24:14Z dg43tfdfdgfd