(Oct 30): The devastation from Hurricane Melissa began to come into focus Wednesday evening after the record-setting storm moved past Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba with at least 30 deaths and almost US$8 billion of damage in its wake.
Across the Caribbean, the storm’s powerful winds have torn apart homes and buildings, blocked roads, trapped people on roofs and knocked out electricity. Airports on Jamaica were shut down, leaving about 25,000 tourists stranded. Authorities warned people to beware of crocodiles displaced by the storm.
The economic losses in Jamaica will hinge on the severity of flooding. But current estimates fall around US$7.7 billion, said Chuck Watson, a disaster modeller at Enki Research. That’s about 35% of the island’s gross domestic product.
“It was widespread destruction,” Watson said, exceeding the US$6 billion toll that Hurricane Gilbert inflicted on the island in 1988. “This was a very slow, very wet storm,” he said, adding that a faster-moving storm would have caused much less damage.
Melissa’s top winds had dropped to 90 miles (145km) per hour as of 5pm New York time, according to the US National Hurricane Center. The storm — now Category 1 — is gathering speed as it pushes through the Bahamas. The storm will likely inflict structural damage and take down trees and power lines, said Adam Douty, a senior forecaster at AccuWeather.
“The impact across the Bahamas may be overshadowed to some extent by what’s happened so far, but it’s going to be fairly significant,” Douty said.
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At least 23 people have died across Haiti and 13 are missing, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said in a statement, revising the death toll downward on Wednesday. Twenty of those reported dead and 10 of the missing are from a southern coastal town where flooding collapsed dozens of homes. At least eight are dead in Jamaica.
All the international tourists in Jamaica are safe and accounted for, The New York Times reported. Senior US State Department officials said more than 8,200 US citizens are in Jamaica and other countries affected by the storm, according to a federal travel registry, though the total number still on the ground is likely higher.
Melissa became the strongest recorded storm ever to hit Jamaica when it made landfall on Tuesday as a Category 5 storm — the highest on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. Authorities described scenes of intense destruction, including blackouts over almost 80% of the country as well as hospitals that were completely devastated.
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“Our shelters have seen more than 25,000 Jamaicans and since last night more persons have been going into the shelters,” Desmond McKenzie, the minister of local government and rural development, said in a briefing on Wednesday morning. “It’s not going to be an easy road, Jamaica.”
In Montego Bay, a major resort hub on the northern shore of the island, buildings were stripped of their roofs and streets were left heavily flooded. At the edge of the city, at least one terminal at Sangster International Airport — the island’s largest — was also partially flooded. The company that operates Sangster and the airport in Kingston said it would work to reopen both airports as soon as possible so humanitarian aid could be flown in.
“In the middle of all of this, a baby was safely delivered under emergency conditions,” McKenzie said. “So there is a Melissa baby, and we want to commend the team who responded to that.”
Insurance coverage varies widely across Jamaica and between sectors, said Firas Saleh, a director of insurance solutions at Moody’s. While hotels tend to carry significant coverage, many local businesses do not — and less than 10% of single-family Jamaican homes are insured, he said.
“These gaps leave many households and businesses vulnerable to severe financial and social disruption from Hurricane Melissa,” Saleh said.
Despite Melissa’s strength and the destruction wrought across Jamaica, Douty said the island was spared an “absolute worst-case scenario” in dodging a direct hit on its capital and largest city, Kingston.
President Donald Trump told reporters this week that the US was prepared to deliver humanitarian assistance to Jamaica as the storm took hold.
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A regional disaster response team is on its way to assist on the ground in Jamaica and the Bahamas, according to senior State Department officials, with personnel set to arrive in the Dominican Republic by Thursday afternoon to handle operations in Haiti.
Such teams typically assist governments with coordination, logistics and administrative needs. The team will also assess the local need for food, sanitation and sheltering supplies, the officials said, pulling from a warehouse in Miami as well as from non-governmental and other partner organisations with resources nearby.
US Southern Command is preparing to deploy a situational assessment team to evaluate needs and local conditions in hurricane-struck areas, said US Army Colonel Emanuel Ortiz, adding that future decisions on potential US support will be based on their assessments.
As aid groups begin to mobilise, Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management has made a broad appeal for supplies — including 100,000 mattresses and pillows to stock emergency shelters and more than 5,000 chainsaws to begin clearing debris. Elon Musk’s Starlink is providing satellite assistance to help Jamaicans get back online after damage to communications infrastructure, authorities said on Wednesday.
The UK pre-positioned a Royal Navy ship and specialist rapid deployment teams in the region prior to Melissa’s landfall and stands ready to offer Jamaica Britain’s “full support”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday. “The scenes of destruction emerging from Jamaica are truly shocking,” he said.
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