Sheryl Lee Ralph and her family are safe and praying the sun will come out tomorrow.
The “Abbott Elementary” star on Tuesday solicited prayers from her home in Jamaica as she prepared to ride out Hurricane Beryl, which swept along the island’s southern coast on Wednesday night, bringing more than 12 hours of heavy rain. After making landfall on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula on Friday, Beryl is now classified as a tropical storm.
“Thank you to everybody for your good vibes and your prayers,” Ralph wrote in a Thursday video posted to X. “We don’t have any lights. There is no power. But we have life.”
The actor is in Kingston for her son Etienne Maurice’s marriage to ABC News producer Stephanie Wash. Despite the storm, the couple has not indicated their Saturday wedding will be canceled or postponed, and Ralph said she is “praying for sunshine.” (She even sang as much to the storm itself.)
“We got scrubbed by the eye of Beryl, but she is on her way off somewhere else,” she continued, adding in her caption that while Kingston “did not get a direct hit,” Carriacou, a Caribbean island in Grenada, “needs help.”
Satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed swaths of Carriacou being decimated by Beryl’s 150 mph winds. Officials said roughly 98% of buildings on the island and neighboring Petite Martinique had been destroyed.
“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said at a Thursday briefing.
Meanwhile, Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the CBC that although the island sustained damage to its coastline, housing infrastructure and roads, it “certainly escaped the worst.”
“I continue to ask you to pray for others as you would pray for yourself and just put something positive out in the world ’cause there are people who need it,” Ralph said in another post from Thursday.
As of Friday afternoon, Beryl is moving northwestward. The storm is predicted to reach northeastern Mexico and southern Texas by the end of the weekend, the National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center said Friday.
Casualties have risen to at least 10 people, the BBC reported; St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada and Venezuela reported three deaths each, while one person died in Jamaica.
