Hurricane Beryl Nears Yucatán Peninsula, Bringing Dangerous Winds and Heavy Rain

Hurricane Beryl was close to making landfall on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula Friday morning as a Category 2 storm, after spending the last week tearing through the eastern Caribbean, where it left islands flattened. The storm was expected to make landfall on Friday before emerging in the Gulf of Mexico.

At least eight people have been killed as the storm lashed parts of Grenada, then Jamaica and the Cayman Islands this week. Beryl, which formed as a tropical storm last Friday, grew at one point to a Category 5 hurricane, breaking a record for the earliest such storm in the Atlantic season.

The storm has left destruction in its wake.

Beryl made landfall on Monday in Grenada, where officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, where 9,000 to 10,000 people live in total, had been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health facility. Crops were ravaged, and fallen trees and utility poles littered the streets.

“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” said Dickon Mitchell, prime minister of Grenada.

It then churned along toward Jamaica, where on Wednesday heavy rain and destructive winds left their mark as well. Beryl was the strongest storm to approach the island in over a decade.