From shock to cleanup

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 17th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: recovering from Hurricane Beryl. This week, millions of people are still picking up the pieces after the storm hit a handful of Caribbean islands and then made its way to the United States.

EICHER: How are recovery efforts going? WORLD’S Paul Butler has the story.

SOUND: [Neighbors passing buckets]

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER:These Vermont neighbors in the town of Waterbury spent the weekend digging homes out of muck—passing buckets of sludge to the curb in a make-shift fire brigade line. Remnants of Hurricane Beryl hit the state last week, killing two people and taking out bridges, roads, and homes.

Vermont Resident Owen Bradley’s house is near a flooded river.

OWEN BRADLEY: This is the worst I've ever seen. Worst I've ever seen. I have been in this house since 1986 and we've never had water come to our front door.

And Vermont isn’t the only state facing a long cleanup. More than 80,000 are still without power in Texas, down from about a million last week.

SOUND: [TEARING INTO CEILING]

Tracy Hamblin is a volunteer in Houston and is helping a 72-year old resident with house repairs after the storm.

TRACY HAMBLIN: We've seen like lots of devastation from the recent weather and we're trying to respond to it.

But the most devastating damage occurred in the Caribbean. Beryl hit Jamaica as a category 5 hurricane.

TELEVISION JAMAICA: I’m trying to see if I can clear these trees and get this telephone poll removed.

This man told Television Jamaica that he’s trying to clear debris so his family can reach a shelter.

RESIDENT: We want them to be able to get out and in.

Other islands are even worse off. It could take months or even years to recover from the storm. Samaritan’s Purse Deputy Director of International Projects Aaron Ashoff says it could take months or years to recover from the storm.

AARON ASHOFF: From the sky, it just looks like bombs had been dropped on Carriacou Island, Union Island, Petite Martinique and there, there wasn't a house that was not damaged.

On Carriacou, Beryl took most of the roof off of the health clinic there, so one of the first things Samaritan did was set up an emergency field hospital while sending more medical teams to other islands.

ASHOFF: When I was there, babies were coming in, elderly parents were coming in. There's a 97-year-old woman that was brought in, people who who were on medications for diabetes or heart medication that needed care.

Once the most dire needs after the hurricane are met, crews can begin to move to the cleanup phase.

ASHOFF: A lot of people are now out of the shock phase of what happened and realized they lost everything.

KJP: The president spoke with Houston mayor Whitmire, and Harris County judge, Lena Hidalgo, about the impacts of Hurricane Beryl, and they both asked for help from the federal government…

Beryl is expected to cost U.S. insurers about $2.7 billion dollars in damages. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for 67 Texas counties.

Due to the intensity of the tropical storm, the damage across the Caribbean was not unexpected. But why did Beryl cause so much damage in Texas when it was greatly weakened by the time it arrived in the U.S.?

Anthony Lupo is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri.

ANTHONY LUPO: As Beryl came ashore in Texas, I think it was a storm that was moving a little bit slower, and for that reason, you may have seen a little more damage than you would if it raced through the area quickly.

NOAA downgraded Beryl to a category 1 by the time it came ashore, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. According to professor Lupo, the current categorization known as the Saffir-Simpson Scale only measures wind speed.

LUPO: There isn't anything that's taking into account storm surge or rainfall or even tornado potential. So, I think there have been some efforts to try to consider more of these other factors, but there's been no consensus on how to do that.

As Beryl slowed down over Texas, it meant more wind and rain for a longer period of time, and with the many other weather related damage earlier in the year, cities like Houston suffered more than expected.

But once the storm moved northeast, it was much more predictable.

LUPO: It really didn't cause a lot of damage once it got out of Texas. In Missouri, we didn't experience much from that storm at all, and then once it got to the northeast, it combined with mid latitude jet streams to produce a very strong, severe weather situation that looked more like the midwest.

SOUND: [TEARING OUT DRYWALL AND INSULATION]

So, now from Waterbury, Vermont, to Houston, Texas, volunteers like Tracy Hamblin are doing what they can to help their neighbors, cleaning up one home at a time:

HAMBLIN: We're trying today, we have a lot of volunteers here that are just helping us remove the wet and moldy materials 'cause at this point, it's been up in there - we know it's been wet for the last week or two…

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Paul Butler with additional reporting from Mary Muncy.

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