Hurricane Beryl’s Path of Black Destruction

By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black(WIB) – More than 2.3 million homes and businesses are without power after Hurricane Beryl, downgraded to Category 1 after hitting category-5 wind speeds last week, made landfall in Houston, Texas, on Monday. The storm slowed even more after moving off of the water and over Texas and continued to dump water over the city as a tropical storm, leading to extensive flooding. Parts of Houston have seen 10 inches of rain, and certain areas could see as much as 15 inches. And as was seen with Hurricane Harvey in 2017, it’s often the city’s Black neighborhoods where the floodwaters crest the highest. The destruction in Houston marks yet another area with a sizeable Black community that Beryl has hit since forming in the tropical Atlantic late last month. The storm, which is abnormally large from so early in the hurricane season, first made landfall in Grenada on July 1 at Category 4 wind speeds, and then cut a path across the Caribbean, causing damage in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other island nations before making landfall in Mexico and turning toward the north. “I’m scared but mostly f******...