Category 4 Hurricane Beryl makes landfall in the east Caribbean with 150 mph winds

MIAMI — Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Carriacou Island in the east Caribbean as a top-end Category 4 storm with 150 mph sustained winds Monday morning, the National Hurricane Center said.

The historic early-season whopper of a storm is expected to bring up to nine feet of storm surge, double-digit rain and sustained winds topping 150 mph through Monday, prompting hurricane watches and warnings for a string of eastern Caribbean Islands as they prepared for a fast, hard punch from a storm unlike any they’ve experienced in decades.

“It’s bad and we have not seen the worst yet. The next few hours are going to be worse,” St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves told the Miami Herald in an interview around noon Monday. “As it reaches close to us, we will be getting the full effect of the hurricane.”

As of a 2 p.m. update from the National Hurricane Center, Beryl’s eyewall was about 60 miles west-northwest of Carriacou Island, and the storm was heading west-northwest at 20 mph with sustained winds near 150 mph, the upper end of Category 4. A mid-morning shift nudged the potential track of Beryl’s eye close to Jamaica, which issued a hurricane watch for the island.

Early Monday, hurricane hunter planes swooped over the roiling storm and found it in the final stages of an eyewall replacement cycle, where a bigger, stronger eye emerges and dwarfs the previous one. Storms typically weaken a bit during the replacement cycle but emerge stronger on the other side, as Beryl did.

Overnight, during the replacement cycle, the slightly weakened Beryl grew its wind field substantially, increasing its reach for storm surge and wind effects in the Windward Islands. As of 11 a.m., tropical storm-force winds extended 40 miles from the center, and hurricane-force winds extended up to 125 miles out.

In the 5 a.m. discussion, forecasters noted that Beryl was about to encounter an area of low wind shear, which, combined with the higher-than-usual sea surface temperatures nearby, aided its explosion of growth back to a Category 4 storm.

Over the weekend, Beryl surpassed expectations and rapidly intensified into the first major hurricane of the season in the abnormally hot Atlantic. Beryl is now the earliest Category 4 storm to form in the Atlantic, beating out a record from Hurricane Dennis set on July 8, 2005, a notably intense year for storms.

As Beryl battered the tiny island of Carriacou, off the coast of Grenada, over in St. Vincent and the Grenadines residents were also feeling the Beryl’s strong Category 4 winds, which brought the surf inland.

Prime Minister Gonsalves said the eye’s passage over the southern Grenadines “has caused severe damage in Grenada and we are getting the other bands of the wind.”

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