Beryl heads into Gulf of Mexico after battering Caribbean islands
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00:00Typically an idyllic tourist destination, the Yucatan Peninsula is the second region
00:05battered by storm Beryl, with 170 km per hour winds and heavy rain.
00:10Mexico's top beach destinations were largely spared as the hurricane was downgraded to
00:15a tropical storm, but high winds fell to trees, causing power outages.
00:19Meanwhile, hundreds of tourists were evacuated from hotels and more than 300 flights were
00:24cancelled or delayed.
00:26To support locals with the basics, more than 8,000 troops from the Mexican Armed Forces
00:31were deployed.
00:32Well, when I left the house we didn't have electricity.
00:37Now I don't know, I haven't gone back.
00:41Maybe the power is back on, but there was no internet, no electricity.
00:46A tree fell down on my little house and destroyed half of it, including the roof.
00:53Storm Beryl, the first of the year, made landfall in the Caribbean on Tuesday.
00:58The earliest storm to develop into a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic wreaked havoc
01:03across the island region and caused at least 11 deaths.
01:08Thousands are now homeless after more than 12 hours of heavy rain left a trail of devastation
01:13in places like Jamaica, Granada and St Vincent.
01:17The islands were really dramatically, catastrophically, catastrophically hit.
01:22So the desalination plants have been knocked out.
01:26All of the cell towers have been knocked out.
01:29All of the fiber optic cables have been knocked out.
01:31The roads are impassable.
01:33We probably have about 95% of the housing stock destroyed.
01:37So really any, and that means, and by default, all the local businesses, all the income generating
01:43activities and the list goes on.
01:47Beryl is expected to intensify as it moves to northeastern Mexico and southern Texas
01:51by the end of the weekend, leaving more destruction in its wake.