As Hurricane Beryl headed toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands as a powerful Category 4 storm early Wednesday, a clearer picture emerged of the devastation it has caused on the two tiny islands of Grenada, with the country’s leader describing the destruction as “unimaginable” and “total.”
“We have to rebuild from scratch,” Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said at a news conference after visiting the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, which were devastated by Beryl on Monday.
Officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on both islands, home to between 9,000 and 10,000 people, were damaged or destroyed, including the Princess Royal Hospital, Carriacou’s main medical facility, the airport and the marina. As of Tuesday night, both islands were without electricity and communications were down. Crops were destroyed and downed trees and utility poles littered the streets.
The natural environment has also been hit hard: “There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on Carriacou, the mangroves are completely destroyed,” Mitchell said.
But the death toll appears to be low: Officials have reported three deaths from the storm in Grenada, two of them on the island of Carriacou, and one in the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, while Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro reported three deaths in the north of the country on Tuesday.
Beryl, which peaked as a Category 5 storm on Tuesday morning, is expected to become a major hurricane on Wednesday, either hitting or approaching Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Prime Minister Andrew Holness addressed the Jamaican nation on Tuesday night and announced a 12-hour curfew, beginning at 6 a.m. Evacuation orders have been issued for low-lying areas.
In the Cayman Islands, sandbags were handed out at packed hardware stores as hurricane-experienced residents braced for Beryl.
“We’ve had waves and wind and we’ve made the most of it, but this is going to be on a whole other level,” said Luigi Moxham, owner of Cayman Cabana, a beachfront restaurant in the Cayman Islands capital, George Town. He said he spent Tuesday morning “stripping the restaurant down to its bones.”
Mitchell said many people on the main island of Grenada have lost their homes, but the damage on Carriacou and Petite Martinique is much worse, with authorities still assessing the extent of the damage on both islands, particularly to the power grid and water supplies.
Grenada, like many Caribbean countries, gets most of its drinking water from rainwater harvesting that runs through roof drains into storage tanks. Terence Smith, the country’s water commissioner, said he did not expect the storm damage to cause immediate life-threatening water shortages on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique.
“We don’t think that’s likely,” Smith said Tuesday. “If it’s true that most homes have lost their roofs, they can’t store rainwater anymore. But many of these homes have several weeks’ worth of water stored.”
Yet the recent drought has left many households on the islands Desalination Plant Smith said water resources in Carriacou and Petite Martinique were “probably affected by the hurricane.” I was in a state of tension Long before the hurricane arrived.
Beryl set records as the first Category 4 hurricane and the first Category 5 storm to form in the Atlantic so early in the season. Recent studies have found that warming ocean temperatures are increasing the likelihood of Atlantic hurricanes growing from weak storms to major Category 3 or higher storms in just 24 hours.
Mitchell said Beryl was a direct result of global warming and that Grenada and countries like it were on the frontline of the climate crisis. “We are no longer prepared to accept that we continue to suffer significant and tangible loss and damage resulting from climatic phenomena and be asked to rebuild year after year while the countries that created and exacerbated this situation stand by idly,” he said.
Jovan Johnson contributed reporting from Kingston, Jamaica, and Daphne Ewing Chow contributed reporting from Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands.