Storm chaser's firsthand account of facing Hurricane Beryl in Carriacou
Storm chaser Brandon Clement describes the scene as Hurricane Beryl made landfall on Grenada's Carriacou Island on July 1, with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, marking an exceptionally early start to the Atlantic hurricane season.
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00:00Tell us about what you witnessed when the eye of a barrel came right over
00:06Karaku a couple of days ago. Well leading up to the storm before the eye got there
00:12it was remarkably slow for a hurricane. The winds were not bad at all. The eye
00:19was 30 miles away and we were barely getting tropical storm force gusts. Just
00:25felt like a breezy windy day with some rain and the eye wall hit. It went from
00:31zero to a hundred and fifty just like that. It was just instantaneous almost.
00:35The eye wall itself was probably not probably it was the most intense
00:40hurricane I've ever been in. I've been in a lot of a lot of intense ones from Irma,
00:46Maria, Harvey, Michael. This one just was on another level.
00:51Debris just filled the air. Saw pine palm trees which are usually extremely
00:57you know bendable and and flexible just start breaking and falling and roofs
01:04flying off and the sound of just debris. It sounded like like you would hear in a
01:09tornado. Just so much debris coming. Thankfully the storm was so compact and
01:13moving quickly that the most intense part of the eye wall only lasted about
01:1815 minutes but during that process it took the roof off of the hotel we were
01:23in. We had to get up in the closet and I had a closet with an extra overhead
01:29space that offered some shelter with some doors. Managed to ride out the last
01:34couple minutes in there before the eye. Once the eye was there we were able to
01:37get out go to a safer room. I was able to put the drone up get get some damage
01:42footage. We were assessing on the ground what it was like. Trying to warn the one
01:46of the people there that this was just an eye we're not over with and the back
01:49side of the eye has always been in my experience the most dangerous part
01:53because all the debris that gets knocked off on the front part of the eye it's
01:58all loose already and everything is bent one way and then when the wind comes
02:01back the opposite direction all that debris at once gets picked up and pushed
02:05over. All the stuff that's been bent one way is now being bent back the
02:09other way and snapping and breaking. So that's when you get all the debris
02:12loading. That was definitely the case in Vero and the first 10 minutes
02:18after that eye passed was just absolute insanity. And really quickly Brandon I
02:25understand that you've been a big help to the people down there. Yeah so we had
02:32a brought a Starlink unit. I was able I was one of the first ones to get a
02:35Starlink mini which is a lower power version of the Starlink more portable.
02:39Brought it with us when the comms went down the island the cell phones went
02:43down the electricity grid went down even the ham radios everything was down. So I
02:49was the only person on the whole island with with internet and Toms for a while
02:52and we set the Starlink up and we're going around the island we'd set up went
02:57to the hospital and to the emergency management the police station and then
03:00other pockets of other communities and set up a Starlink open the Wi-Fi up
03:04asked everybody to limit it to voice and text but to call family members let
03:08everybody know they're okay and let them spread the word. And at one point I
03:12think we had 93 people hooked up to the Wi-Fi on one stop and we would just do
03:1510 to 15 minutes per stop to try and give as many people access as possible.
03:18And I understand that you've had some communication with the Prime Minister.
03:24Yeah Prime Minister actually called me on whatsapp at 10 p.m. after the storm
03:28he's like hey thank God I can talk to somebody on the island you're the only
03:31person I've been able to get in touch with. He realized you know my experience
03:36in these types of situations asked me what they needed first what the areas
03:41were like what the people were doing who where we could go to get get the
03:47Starlink in contact with them the next day to best organize their their their
03:51response. He was amazingly communicative for what was needed on the
03:58ground and listened which was impressive. The next day he comes in he flew in the
04:03next morning we met our next afternoon we met him at the airport there. He was
04:08super kind. Starlink ran out of data because we gave you know we're letting
04:12everybody use our data. We couldn't re-up until we got back to an internet
04:15connection. So he was nice enough to let us have access to get back to the island
04:20on his plane and we were able to get out last night to continue reporting on on
04:25the hurricane.