Officials plead for $9 million in aid weeks after Hurricane Beryl devastated the southeast Caribbean

ST. GEORGE’S (AP) — People in the southeast Caribbean urgently need food, water and shelter nearly two weeks after Hurricane Beryl crushed the region as a Category 4 storm, officials said Thursday as they pleaded for at least $9 million in assistance from the international community.

Thousands of people across Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines were left homeless by the storm, which killed at least seven people and destroyed schools, businesses and livelihoods on the archipelago.

“Together they constitute Beryl’s Armageddon,” said Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. “In just a few hours, entire islands were decimated. “There is nothing there, really. The housing, public facilities … the shoreline, the fisheries, tourism infrastructure, they are basically no more,” he said during a news briefing as his voice broke.

Beryl set a record for the first-ever Category 4 storm in June in the Atlantic, making landfall July 1 on Carriacou in Grenada and swiping nearby islands. The hurricane, just shy of a Category 5 storm, crushed power grids, destroyed water systems and killed livestock and fishing equipment that many in impoverished communities on affected islands depended on for a living.