Hurricane Beryl, a Category 4 storm, is rapidly approaching Jamaica: Live updates

Officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on the islands, home to between 9,000 and 10,000 people, were damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main medical facility, Princess Royal Hospital, the airport and the hospital’s marina. As of Tuesday night, there was no electricity on both islands and communications were down. Crops were destroyed, trees were downed and electricity poles were strewn across streets.

The natural environment has also been devastated. “There is literally no vegetation left on Carriacou, the mangroves have been completely destroyed,” said Mitchell.

But the death toll appears to be low. Officials reported three deaths from the storm in Grenada, two of them in Carriacou. Another was reported in the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Tuesday that three people had died in the north of that country.

Beryl, which peaked as a Category 5 storm Tuesday morning, is still expected to be a major hurricane when it makes landfall in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Wednesday, with the possibility of a direct or near-miss. Prime Minister Andrew Holness addressed the Jamaican public on Tuesday evening, imposing a 12-hour curfew starting at 6 a.m. Evacuation orders have been issued for low-lying areas.

In the Cayman Islands, a hardware store packed with shoppers was handing out sandbags, and residents with extensive hurricane experience were preparing for Hurricane Beryl.

“We have waves and wind, and we make the most of it, but this — this is going to be on a whole other level,” said Luigi Moxam, owner of Cayman Cabana, a waterfront restaurant in George Town, the capital of the Cayman Islands. He said he spent Tuesday morning “stripping the restaurant down to a skeleton.”

Many people on Grenada’s main island were left homeless, but the damage was much worse on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, Mitchell said. Officials are still trying to assess the extent of the damage on the two islands, particularly to power grids and water supplies.

Grenada, like other Caribbean nations, gets most of its drinking water from rainwater collection, including rooftop drains that feed into storage tanks. Terrence Smith, the country’s water agency chief, said the storm damage was not expected to immediately cause life-threatening shortages in Carriacou and Petite Martinique.

“We think that’s very unlikely,” Smith said Tuesday. “If most of the homes lost their roofs, they wouldn’t be able to collect rainwater. But many of these homes have weeks of storage.”

However, a recent drought has forced many households on the island to rely on desalination plant for water, and Mr. Smith said plants on Carriacou and Petite Martinique “could be negatively impacted by the storm.” That system was stressed before the storm hits.

Beryl set records as the first Category 4 hurricane, and later the first Category 5 hurricane to form in the Atlantic Ocean so early in the hurricane season. A recent study found that as ocean temperatures rise, Atlantic hurricanes are more likely to grow from a weak storm to a major Category 3 or higher hurricane in just 24 hours.

Mitchell called Beryl a direct result of global warming, saying Grenada and countries like it were on the front lines of the climate crisis. “We are no longer willing to accept that we are continually suffering significant, tangible loss and damage from climate-related events and are expected to rebuild year after year while the countries responsible for creating this situation — and exacerbating it — sit idly by,” he said.

Jovan Johnson contributed reporting from Kingston, Jamaica and Daphne Ewing-Chow from Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands.