Hurricane Beryl bears down on Jamaica

Powerful Hurricane Beryl churned toward Jamaica on Wednesday with dangerous winds and sea surge, as residents braced for a storm that killed seven people and caused destruction in the Caribbean.

The hurricane — unusually strong so early in the Atlantic season — was expected to pass near or over Jamaica in the next hours as a life-threatening Category 4 storm on a five-level scale, meteorologists said around midday. Beryl is the first storm since US National Hurricane Center (NHC) records began to reach the Category 4 level in June and the earliest to reach Category 5 in July.

Across Jamaica, people removed boats from the water and tied them to fences for safety and rushed to buy food, water, gasoline and other essentials.

As of midday Wednesday the storm was packing maximum sustained winds 145 mph (230 kph), said the NHC. Tropical storm conditions are spreading through the island, it said.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness has declared an island-wide 6 am to 6 pm curfew and urged Jamaicans to comply with evacuation orders.

“If you live in a low lying area, an area historically prone to flooding and landslide or if you live on the banks of a river,” he said in a video posted on social media, “I implore you to evacuate to a shelter, or to safer ground.”