Hope Pastures kept power through Hurricane Beryl while overhead lines failed elsewhere in Kingston. A civil engineer says the difference, underground circuits, is the template Jamaica needs to actually adopt.

St Vincent and the Grenadines has signed an agreement to rebuild Palm Island Resort and the Anchorage Yacht Club on Union Island, both destroyed by Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, as a luxury five-star resort and a boutique four-star property with more than 200 permanent jobs expected on completion.

As Melissa threatened Jamaica’s south coast in October 2025, St Elizabeth was still rebuilding from Beryl more than a year earlier. The parish’s communities, many still in partial recovery, faced a Category 5 storm with patched roofs and depleted resources. It is a pattern the country can no longer afford to repeat.

One year after Hurricane Beryl, south coast communities around Black River and Treasure Beach remain in various stages of incomplete recovery. The pattern of storm, inadequate rebuilding and renewed exposure is not a natural disaster cycle. It is a structural failure in Jamaica’s approach to coastal housing resilience.

Five Rocky Point, Clarendon, residents still in a shelter months after Hurricane Beryl were to get new homes after SCJ Holdings donated land to Food For The Poor to build five houses, Councillor Winston Maragh said.

Hurricane Beryl damaged over 13,500 Jamaican homes in 2024. As Caribbean insurance rates rise 10 to 20 per cent and the global protection gap widens, the link between climate risk and property value is no longer theoretical.

The Ministry of Labour and Social Security is finalising an agreement with Global Empowerment Mission to rebuild 500 roofs damaged by Hurricane Beryl, with the charity supplying materials and the ministry covering labour.

Hurricane Beryl brought down the entire roof of St Peter’s Anglican Church in Pedro Plains, St Elizabeth, a 1941 building that is mother church to six congregations. Seven weeks later, repairs had not started and no cost estimate was given.

Families whose homes were damaged by Hurricane Beryl are expected to begin receiving government grants of up to $400,000 within four weeks, with damage assessments on more than 8,300 homes nearly complete.

Hurricane Beryl tore the entire roof off Beacon Pentecostal Church of God Trinity in Treasure Beach and nearly all of the roof off its pastor’s adjoining home. Services went on under the open sky, and a GoFundMe was set up.