Hurricane Beryl churns toward Mexico

TULUM, Mexico (AP):

Hurricane Beryl ripped off roofs in Jamaica, jumbled fishing boats in Barbados and damaged or destroyed 95 per cent of homes on a pair of islands in St Vincent and the Grenadines before rumbling past the Cayman Islands early Thursday and taking aim at Mexico’s Caribbean coast. At least nine people were killed.

What had been the earliest storm to develop into a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic weakened to a Category 2 by the afternoon.

Jack Beven, senior hurricane specialist at the US Hurricane Center, said “the biggest immediate threat now that the storm is moving away from the Cayman Islands is landfall in the Yucatan Peninsula” in Mexico.

The storm’s centre was about 135 miles (215 kilometres) west of Grand Cayman island and 275 miles (445 kilometres) east-southeast of Tulum, Mexico. It had maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (175 kph) and was moving west-northwest at 18 mph (about 30 kph).

Mexico’s popular Caribbean coast prepared shelters, evacuated some small outlying coastal communities and even moved sea turtle eggs off beaches threatened by storm surge.

In Playa del Carmen, most businesses were closed Thursday and some were boarding up windows as tourists jogged by and some locals walked their dogs under sunny skies. In Tulum, Mexico’s Navy patrolled the streets telling tourists in Spanish and English to prepare for the storm’s arrival. Everything was scheduled to shut down by midday.

The head of Mexico’s civil defence agency, Laura Velázquez, said Thursday that Beryl is expected to be a category-1 hurricane when it hits a relatively unpopulated stretch of Mexico’s Caribbean coast south of Tulum early Friday.

But once Beryl re-emerges into the Gulf of Mexico a day later, she said it is again expected to build to hurricane strength and could hit right around the Mexico-US border, at Matamoros. That area was already soaked in June by Tropical Storm Alberto.