Jamaica Braces for 'Massive Devastation' as Strongest Storm in Recorded History Looms

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – With the strongest hurricane in its recorded history churning just off its coast, Jamaica is bracing for what officials have warned could be "massive devastation" as the catastrophic Category 5 Hurricane Melissa prepares to make a direct and punishing hit on the island nation on Tuesday.

The colossal storm, the most powerful to form in the Atlantic this year, is threatening catastrophic damage with sustained winds of 175 miles per hour and a deluge of moisture forecast to drop nearly three feet of rain, prompting dire warnings from the nation's prime minister and a desperate, last-minute plea for residents in low-lying areas to heed evacuation orders amid fears of a looming humanitarian crisis.

The impending landfall of Melissa, a storm of historic and terrifying proportions, has sent shockwaves across the Caribbean, triggering mass evacuations in Cuba, drenching Haiti and the Dominican Republic where it has already been blamed for multiple deaths, and forcing the U.S. Navy to move personnel and warships out of its path.

But the most acute danger is focused on Jamaica, where officials have done all they can to prepare for a storm so powerful that, as its leader warned, no country in the region has the infrastructure to withstand it.

A Storm of Historic Proportions

According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, Hurricane Melissa was centered approximately 150 miles southwest of the capital, Kingston, late Monday, moving at a painstakingly slow pace of just two to three miles per hour.

This lumbering speed, as reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP), is a significant part of its destructive potential, meaning areas in its path could endure punishing, hurricane-force conditions for a much longer duration than is typical.

The Associated Press (AP) noted that the storm is the strongest to lash the island since recordkeeping began 174 years ago.

Forecasters expect it to make landfall early Tuesday in St. Elizabeth Parish on the southwestern coast, about 75 miles west of Kingston, before slicing diagonally across the island.

The NHC, in a stark assessment reported by The New York Times, warned that the winds in Melissa’s eyewall are so strong they could cause “total structural failure,” leading to widespread and lengthy power and communication outages.

Strengthened by Caribbean water temperatures that are far warmer than usual, the storm is a behemoth, and scientists have pointed to its rapid intensification as a hallmark of climate change.

"Human-caused climate change is making all of the worst aspects of Hurricane Melissa even worse," climate scientist Daniel Gilford told AFP, a sentiment echoed by meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, who noted that global warming is causing more storms to rapidly intensify, raising the potential for enormous and deadly rainfall.

'No Infrastructure Can Withstand This'

The warnings from Jamaican officials have been consistently grave and unequivocal. Prime Minister Andrew Holness, in multiple statements to the press, has sought to impress upon the public the unprecedented nature of the threat.

"I don't believe there is any infrastructure within this region that could withstand a Category 5 storm, so there could be significant dislocation," he told CNN, as reported by AFP.

Speaking to the AP, he reiterated the point: "The question now is the speed of recovery. That’s the challenge.”

The expected impacts are multi-faceted and life-threatening. The NHC has warned of a storm surge along Jamaica's southern coast that could see waters rise as high as 13 feet, or four meters, accompanied by "destructive waves." 

This has raised particular concern for coastal hospitals, with Health Minister Christopher Tufton telling the AP that some patients had been relocated from ground floors to higher levels in the hope it would "suffice for any surge that will take place.”

Heavy rainfall, with forecasts of up to 40 inches, or one meter, is expected to trigger "catastrophic" flash flooding and landslides across the island's mountainous terrain.

Even before the storm's arrival, numerous power outages, fallen trees, and landslides were being reported, with officials cautioning that the full damage assessment and cleanup would be a slow and arduous process.

A Crisis of Evacuation

Despite the dire and repeated warnings, a second and equally dangerous crisis was unfolding on Monday: a dangerously slow and inadequate response to mandatory evacuation orders.

The Jamaican authorities anticipate that the storm will displace around 50,000 people. However, as reported by The New York Times, by Monday evening, only about 1,700 people had evacuated to the nation's 880 shelters.

Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s minister for local government, expressed grave concern over the low numbers. "I want to urge persons in these parishes to get to high ground as quickly as possible," he said at a news conference, as reported by AFP. 

He noted that shelters "should be seeing people now," but acknowledged that some residents were encountering problems, including arriving at designated shelters only to find them closed, awaiting a manager to open them. He admitted these issues indicated that some aspects of disaster preparedness needed strengthening.

Many residents, however, were simply choosing to stay put, a decision rooted in a combination of fatalism and a lack of faith in the public shelter system.

"I am not moving. I don't believe I can run from death," Roy Brown, a plumber in Kingston's seaside area of Port Royal, told AFP, citing his past experiences with the poor conditions of government shelters. Fisherwoman Jennifer Ramdial agreed, stating simply, "I just don't want to leave."

Prime Minister Holness pleaded with the public, framing the evacuation as a matter of "the national good of saving lives." "You have been warned," he said. "It's now up to you to use that information to make the right decision."

The Limits of Preparation and a Regional Ripple Effect

Disaster preparedness experts, cited by The New York Times, noted that Jamaica faces immense challenges in preparing for a storm of this magnitude due to its small size and limited resources. As a nation dependent on tourism for about a third of its revenue, its capacity for a large-scale disaster response is strained.

“When an island nation gets threatened by a storm of this caliber, it is a very significant and unusual kind of problem, because in terms of evacuation, there’s a limit to where people who are evacuated can actually go,” said Irwin Redlener, founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

He added that it was "extremely unlikely" there would be enough space to safely accommodate all affected residents.

The storm's impact is being felt across the entire region. Cuban officials announced they were evacuating more than 600,000 people from eastern provinces ahead of Melissa's expected arrival late Tuesday. The U.S. Navy completed the evacuation of about 1,000 nonessential personnel from its base at Guantánamo Bay and moved eight warships deployed to the Caribbean out of the storm’s path.

The storm has already proven deadly. By Tuesday morning, it had been blamed for seven deaths in the Caribbean: three in Jamaica from pre-storm preparations, three in Haiti, and one in the Dominican Republic, where another person remains missing, according to the AP and AFP.

The situation in Haiti is further complicated by strained international aid resources. The World Food Program has positioned 450 metric tons of food in the country, a fraction of what is normally on standby, as many donors have shifted their priorities to crises in Gaza and Ukraine, The New York Times reported.

The Ecological Toll

Beyond the immediate human and infrastructural threat, Hurricane Melissa is poised to inflict a profound and lasting wound on Jamaica's unique biodiversity.

In a poignant and unusual detail reported by The New York Times, hurricane hunters flying into the storm's vortex sent a message that included the simple sentence: "Birds in eyewall." It is not uncommon for migrating birds to be sucked into a hurricane's winds and become trapped in the relative calm of the eye, forced to fly with the storm for vast distances.

This small observation underscores a much larger ecological catastrophe. Donovan Campbell, a professor of environmental geography at the University of the West Indies near Kingston, told the Times that the storm threatens to "reverse decades of progress in ecosystem restoration and conservation," with Jamaica's coral reefs, mangroves, and terrestrial ecosystems all in peril.

The destruction of this natural environment, he noted, will disproportionately affect Jamaicans who depend on it for their livelihoods, who are often among the poorest and most vulnerable. As the strongest storm in its history bears down, Jamaica is facing a multi-faceted assault on its people, its infrastructure, and the very land itself.