With hours to go before passing Jamaica, Hurricane Beryl did not appear to be weakening as much as forecasters hoped on Wednesday morning.
The island is battened down ahead of what is expected to be a hard hit from a powerful storm, bringing up to 9 feet of storm surge, a foot of rain and hurricane-force winds. The deadly storm has already claimed at least four lives in the southeast Caribbean and is shaping up to be the strongest hurricane to pass the island since Hurricane Ivan, a Category 5 that swiped the southern end of Jamaica in 2004.
Early Wednesday, Beryl was holding on to its Category 4 status with 145 mph sustained winds, although forecasters at the National Hurricane Center continued to predict that “some weakening” could occur before the storm approaches Jamaica midday.
Jamaica should start to feel the first lashes of Beryl’s outer wind this morning, with the eye passing closest to the island mid-afternoon.
As of 8 a.m., Beryl was about 125 miles southeast of Kingston, Jamaica and headed west-northwest at 20 mph, a slight slowdown from the day before.
Next on the forecast track is the Cayman Islands, which are also under hurricane warnings. Beryl is on track to pass south of the islands on Thursday as a strong Category 3 before heading onward to the Yucatan Peninsula.
From there, Beryl is forecast to make another landfall in the Quintana Roo region of Mexico as a Category 1 hurricane, before re-emerging in the Gulf of Mexico as a tropical storm. New on Wednesday morning, the hurricane center now predicts Beryl could re-strengthen to a Category 1 hurricane again before striking the northeast coast of Mexico.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, the hurricane center continued to drop the likelihood that another system would form behind Beryl. By Wednesday morning, it had a 20% chance of strengthening into a tropical depression this week.
Source Agencies
