Toronto residents, Canadian organizations ramping up Hurricane Beryl relief efforts

It’s been days since a historic Category 5 Hurricane Beryl slammed the southeast Caribbean, but residents and groups in the Toronto area and beyond are ramping up efforts to help those in need.

Partnering with Studio M on Eglinton Avenue West near Oakwood Avenue, Reclaim Rebuild Eg West and Black Urbanism TO organized a Grenada hurricane relief event on Friday.

Between 6 and 10 p.m., residents are asked to bring financial donations, water, non-perishable food, first aid supplies, clothing, blankets and other necessities.

“It’s not looking too good in particularly Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Grenada, and St. Vincent (and the Grenadines),” co-organizer Marcus Pereira told CityNews on Friday.

Pereira said he has family in Grenada and is still waiting to hear from them as crews in the country continue to work on restoring utilities.

“It’s worrisome to not get in contact with them, but we stay hopeful that everything’s all right over there right now,” he said.

When it comes to Friday’s event, Pereira said he and others with connections to the region felt a need to step up.

“We figured it would be good to use our connections and our platform and our privilege that we have over here to help the people that are in need overseas,” he said.

Volunteers will be sorting through the items after the drive and putting the collected items into barrels for shipping. Pereira said they expect the items to be in Grenada within one to two weeks.

In Etobicoke, staff and volunteers with GlobalMedic have been working this week to get aid to the Caribbean.

During a tour of the charity’s headquarters, rapid response team members were in the middle of assembling hundreds of family emergency kits. The kits include water purification units to ensure access to drinking water, personal hygiene items, solar lights and food.

A spokesperson said they were working with Air Canada to begin flying the kits south and deliveries were expected to begin as soon as Friday.

In Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Red Cross volunteers and workers have been deployed to help with recovery efforts.

Chiran Livera, an operations manager with Canadian Red Cross, told CityNews crews are responding to urgent health- and shelter-related needs. He said up to 70 per cent of St. Vincent and the Grenadines was destroyed by Hurricane Beryl, adding Grenada was also hit hard.

“There’s a lot of roofs that have been damaged, a lot of wind damage, some flooding, some roads have been washed away and destroyed, but thankfully the number of deaths has been not very high,” Livera said.

He said the agency has been working on educating residents on how to prepare for Category 4 or Category 5 (the worst on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale). They’ve also worked with people to help build stronger structures, particularly focusing on how to better secure roofs.

Livera also said they began pre-positioning emergency supplies in regional warehouses within the past few months.

“With climate change and the temperatures of the waters being higher than normal, this was a bit unanticipated,” he said.

As someone who described previously working in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Livera described dealing with intense hurricanes as “very traumatic” in the days that follow. The Red Cross in Canada is collecting donations to funnel into the Caribbean.

“We can transfer the money directly to our local teams and they’re able to use that to distribute relief items (and) purchase what they need in the local markets,” Livera said.

“We also want to encourage local procurement as much as possible because that helps (keep) the economy going, especially after a major disaster like this.”

Pereira said any level of support helps since the Caribbean is vulnerable.

“These islands in the Caribbean and other places are the least contributors to the climate crisis, and they’re the ones that end up getting impacted the most,” he said.

“We have the privilege to help support them when they need it at their most.”

Hurricane Beryl has been downgraded to a tropical storm as it arrived in Mexico, but forecasters said it could be classified a hurricane again as it moves west and north. The storm made history because it was the earliest in the Atlantic season when a Category 5 hurricane developed.