Prime Min­is­ter of Grena­da Dick­on Mitchell has said that the is­land of Car­ri­a­cou has been “flat­tened” in just half an hour and that gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials al­so ex­pect­ed “ex­treme” dam­age on the neigh­bour­ing is­land of Pe­tite Mar­tinique.

The is­lands were bad­ly hit Beryl, a pow­er­ful Cat­e­go­ry 4 hur­ri­cane that be­gan sweep­ing through the east­ern Caribbean Is­lands on Mon­day, mak­ing a dev­as­tat­ing land­fall on Car­ri­a­cou, a small is­land north of Grena­da.

The force of Hur­ri­cane Beryl — the first of this year’s sea­son — left a trail of de­struc­tion in its path as it made land­fall: trees snapped in half, ex­ten­sive storm surge and roofs blown off as winds reached more than 150 miles per hour.

There was no pow­er on any of the is­lands and com­mu­ni­ca­tion was dif­fi­cult, of­fi­cials said.

Mitchell said that the com­plete scale of the dam­age on Car­ri­a­cou and Pe­tite Mar­tinique would not be clear un­til Mon­day evening, adding that he would trav­el to Car­ri­a­cou as soon as it was safe to do so.

“There was dev­as­ta­tion all around,” the prime min­is­ter said. “We there­fore ex­pect that we will have to quick­ly tran­si­tion in­to dam­age as­sess­ment and re­cov­ery and sta­bi­liza­tion mode.”

Mean­while, of­fi­cials in Bar­ba­dos saidthe is­land was spared the worst of Beryl.

The prime min­is­ter of Bar­ba­dos, Mia Mot­t­ley, told a na­tion­wide broad­cast from the is­land’s emer­gency op­er­a­tions cen­tre that as many as 20 fish­ing boats, in­clud­ing two pop­u­lar cruis­ers, had pos­si­bly sunk. Still, she added, “This could have been far worse for us.”

Rough­ly 40 homes were known to have sus­tained roof or struc­tur­al dam­age so far, she said, though that num­ber was ex­pect­ed to rise as more than 400 res­i­dents re­turned home from shel­ters.

Peo­ple across the east­ern Caribbean had start­ed prepar­ing for the storm over the week­end, in­clud­ing those do­ing some last-minute shop­ping for sup­plies.

Source: https://www.ny­times.com/