LONDON (Reuters) – Hurricane Beryl hit Jamaica as a powerful Category 5 storm on Tuesday after hitting smaller islands in the Caribbean, knocking out power lines, causing flooding and reportedly killing two people.
The storm hit the island of Carriacou, part of Grenada, on Monday, where one person died, the BBC reported, and power was cut across the island. Another person was reportedly killed in São Vicente, although Reuters was unable to immediately verify any of the fatalities.
Beryl is expected to bring 4 to 12 inches of rain to Jamaica on Wednesday, possibly triggering flash flooding, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.
At 1200 GMT, Beryl, packing winds of up to 165 miles per hour (250 kilometers per hour), was about 625 miles (1,006 km) east-southeast of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, it said.
The unusually early timing and rapid intensification of the storm, the first of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, is due in part to warmer ocean temperatures, scientists say.
Jamaica issued a hurricane warning on Monday, while tropical storm warnings were in effect for parts of the southern coast of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The “potentially catastrophic” storm hit the Caribbean region earlier in the day as a Category 4 storm and was expected to bring potentially fatal winds and storm surge to Jamaica.
Although it rose to 5 on a five-point scale, it is expected to become less intense later in the day, the NHC said.
The center of the storm “will move quickly through the southeast and central Caribbean Sea today and is forecast to pass near Jamaica on Wednesday and the Cayman Islands on Thursday,” the weather agency said.
On other eastern Caribbean islands, residents boarded up windows, stocked up on food and filled up their cars before the storm.
Dozens of ships in the storm’s path are at risk of being affected, with diversions observed in the Caribbean, according to Vortexa, which provides energy cargo tracking data.
Authorities in Mexico have also begun preparing for Beryl’s arrival later this week, with the federal government urging authorities and citizens to show “extreme caution.”
(Writing by Bernadette Baum; Editing by Gareth Jones)
