As Hurricane Beryl moved toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands as a powerful Category 4 storm early Wednesday morning, images of the devastation it wrought on the two tiny islands of Grenada became clearer, with the country’s leader calling it “unimaginable” and “complete.”
“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” Grenada Prime Minister Deacon Mitchell told a briefing after visiting the devastated islands of Cariacou and Petite Martinique on Monday, after being hit by Hurricane Beryl.
Officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on the island, home to between 9,000 and 10,000 people, were damaged or destroyed, including the Princess Royal Hospital, Cariako’s main health facility, the airport and the marina. As of Tuesday night, both islands were without electricity and communications were cut. Crops were destroyed, and downed trees and power poles littered the streets.
The natural environment has also been hit. “There is literally no vegetation left on Kariak-u Island, the mangroves have been completely destroyed,” said Mr Mitchell.
But the death toll appears to be low. Authorities have reported three storm-related deaths in Grenada, two of them in Cariacou. Another death was reported in the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, while Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Tuesday that three deaths had been reported in the country’s north.
Beryl, which peaked as a Category 5 storm Tuesday morning, is still expected to be a major hurricane when it reaches Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Wednesday, either directly or in close proximity. Prime Minister Andrew Holness addressed the Jamaican people Tuesday night, imposing a 12-hour curfew from 6 a.m. Evacuation orders have been issued for low-lying areas.
In the Cayman Islands, hardware stores were handing out sandbags to shoppers, and hurricane-experienced residents were bracing for Beryl.
“We have waves and wind and we make the most of it, but this is going to be on a whole other level,” said Luigi Maxam, owner of Cayman Cabana, a waterfront restaurant in George Town, the Cayman Islands capital. He said he spent Tuesday morning “stripping the restaurant down to its bare bones.”
Mr Mitchell said while many people on the main island of Grenada were left homeless, the devastation on Cariacou and Petite Martinique was much more severe. Officials were still trying to assess the extent of the damage on both islands, particularly to the power grid and water supply.
Like other Caribbean countries, Grenada gets most of its drinking water from rainwater harvesting, which flows from roof drains into storage containers. Terrence Smith, the country’s water agency director, said the storm damage was not expected to cause any immediate life-threatening shortages in Cariacou and Petite Martinique.
“We think that’s very unlikely,” Mr Smith said Tuesday. “If it’s true that most of these homes have lost their roofs, they can no longer harvest rainwater. But a lot of these homes have storage facilities that could hold it for weeks.”
Still, the recent drought has left many families on the island dependent on desalination plants for their water, and Mr Smith said the plants in Cariac and Petite Martinique were “probably negatively affected by the hurricane”. The systems were under strain long before the hurricane arrived.
Beryl made history as the first Category 4 hurricane to form in the Atlantic early in the season, and the first Category 5 hurricane to form. Recent studies have shown that as ocean temperatures rise, Atlantic hurricanes are more likely to grow from weak to strong Category 3 hurricanes in just 24 hours.
Mr Mitchell called Beryl a direct result of global warming, and said Grenada and countries like it were on the front lines of the climate crisis. “We are no longer prepared to accept that it is okay to continue to suffer significant losses and damages from climate events, and that we have to rebuild every year while the countries that created and worsened this situation sit idly by,” he said.
Jovan Johnson contributed reporting from Kingston, Jamaica, and Daphne Ewing-Chow contributed reporting from Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands.
