As Beryl Moves On, Ravaged Islands Assess the Devastation

Hurricane Beryl was churning toward the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico at Category 2 strength early Friday after tearing through the eastern Caribbean, where it left islands flattened, communities inundated and at least eight people dead.

The storm, which this week became the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, weakened slightly early Friday, with maximum sustained winds up to 110 miles an hour, according to the National Hurricane Center. It was expected to make landfall in Mexico later on Friday morning.

With the center forecasting “dangerous” storm surges and hurricane-force winds, the Mexican authorities were taking no chances. The government said on Thursday that it had deployed more than 13,000 workers and members of the armed forces, along with rescue dogs, and had set up mobile kitchens and water-treatment plants in Quintana Roo, a southern state facing the Caribbean that may be the first to feel the storm’s impact.

After the hurricane moved on from Jamaica, residents emerged from shelters there to take in a landscape of farmland that had been devastated, homes that had sustained damage and roads that were covered with toppled utility poles and foliage.

“The whole place mash up,” Steve Taylor, a resident of the low-lying coastal town of Mitchell Town, told a local television station.

St. Elizabeth, a farming region known as the country’s bread basket, was hit particularly hard. “Southwest St. Elizabeth is facing complete devastation,” said Jamaica’s agriculture minister, Floyd Green.