‘Jamaica Was Spared the Worst’: Islands Clean Up as Beryl Weakens

Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, tore through a new swath of the Caribbean, where it had left islands flattened and communities inundated, then continued on a path toward Mexico on Thursday.

In Jamaica, residents who emerged from shelters took 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.

Still, as brutal as Hurricane Beryl was, Jamaican officials surveying the destruction said it could have been still worse.

“The damage was not what we had expected, and so we’re very grateful for that,” Prime Minister Andrew Holness told CNN on Thursday. “I think Jamaica was spared the worst.”