What happened
Hurricane Melissa, a slow-moving Category 5 tempest with sustained winds of up to 175 mph, began lashing Jamaica late Monday before making landfall this morning. Melissa is this year’s most powerful storm and is expected to be the strongest ever recorded in Jamaica, dumping up to 40 inches of rain on some parts of the Caribbean island and flooding other areas amid a storm surge of up to 13 feet, the U.S. National Hurricane Center warned Monday.
Who said what
Jamaican officials said Monday evening that at least three people had already died as a result of the storm, which has also been blamed for four deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness told CNN Monday he did not believe there was “any infrastructure within this region that could withstand a Category 5 storm.” Forecasters expected flooded roads and towns, damaged bridges and airports, landslides and a wrecked power grid.
“Tens of thousands of families are facing hours of extreme wind gusts above 100 mph and days of relentless, torrential rainfall,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter. Melissa is crawling along at about 3 mph and “slow-moving major hurricanes often go down in history as some of the deadliest and most destructive storms on record.”
“I have been on my knees in prayer,” Holness said at a news conference. And based on conversations with other leaders, “it would appear the entire world is praying for Jamaica.” The U.S. has an “unusually large fleet of U.S. military ships deployed nearby” as part of President Donald Trump’s Venezuela and drug-boat operations, The Washington Post said. And “many of the personnel” aboard “are trained to respond to natural disasters,” as the U.S. has long done in the Caribbean.
What next?
The U.S. has emergency relief supplies ready and can provide “lifesaving assistance to affected countries and people across the country when it is in the interest of the United States,” a State Department official told the Post. Hurricane Melissa, now “moving slower than expected,” should pass across southeast Cuba and the Bahamas Wednesday, The New York Times said.
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