In July of last year, Hurricane Beryl barreled through the southeastern Caribbean, causing hundreds of millions worth of damage to Grenada’s family islands, St. Vincent, Barbados, and Jamaica, among other nations. Back then, experts had dubbed the category five storm that came ashore at the end of June as the earliest to have ever formed and made landfall in the Atlantic.

Now, 13 months after, the northern, rather than eastern, Caribbean is bracing for Hurricane Erin, which at the weekend had strengthened to a Category Five storm, packing outer band winds of up to 160 miles per hour before weakening to a four on Monday.

Governments and disaster preparedness officials across the Caribbean stepped up preparations for Erin as the work week began with Hispaniola, which houses Haiti and The D

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