After the Hurricane

I got a text from Denico last Wednesday afternoon: ‘I’m okay bro it’s a disaster.’ Power remained down across 75 per cent of Jamaica, and that was all I heard from him for a few days. Aerial footage of rural St Elizabeth showed houses that looked as if they had exploded, with wooden beams and bits of roof strewn everywhere, and birds-eye views into people’s bedrooms. The landscape looks as if it’s been trampled on, the trees stripped sandy brown.

Watching drone footage of Denico’s village, Holland Bamboo, I think I can pick out his concrete house still standing. But the shop he built on the corner has been completely flattened, and his chicken coop is gone too. The main road in St Elizabeth (still a relatively minor, single-lane road) runs south of the village. It was covered in a beautiful arc of green bamboo, a canopy for villagers waiting for a ride into Black River or Santa Cruz. Now the bamboo is dry, cracked and split. Drivers trying to reach family members got trapped on the road for over 24 hours last week, their only sustenance fallen coconuts. Patients from the hospitals of Black River and Savannah-la-Mar, who needed to be moved east to Mandeville for care, couldn’t get through.

Another friend posted YouTube shorts from Montego Bay. ‘This is an apocalypse,’ he said. He had lost contact with his friend Dove and was wading through water to try and find him, navigating fallen trees, power lines and sink holes. Montego Bay (or Mobay) is the biggest tourist destination in Jamaica, home to the island’s largest airport and vast hotel complexes. But in the hills inland there are informal settlements with some of the worst crime rates on the island – connected to turf wars over lottery scamming, the illicit mirror image of the telecommunications sector in Jamaica’s free-trade zones. Dove lives in one of these communities, which has been blocked in by a landslide.

Chris messaged me on Wednesday morning: ‘Right now no electricity, morning is dark and quiet, heard cats chatting, water dripping from the roof. Waiting for the sun to come out to see properly.’ Once day broke, he found no major damage or flooding in his neighbourhood in Portmore: ‘Everyone came out, swept up the garbage.’ But cellphone networks were down and most people couldn’t reach their relatives in rural areas.

In the afternoon Chris drove to Rockfort, East Kingston, where he grew up:

So, been through downtown and it’s not too bad there. Minor damage, shops closed still. Rockfort had zinc fences blown down, one zinc roof got blown off as well. No blocked roads but the potholes are massive, from a football size to the width of a car.

Rockfort is a relatively poor neighbourhood, but the housing in Chris’s patch is fairly solid. Many Jamaicans however live in informal settlements (on ‘captured land’), their walls made of plyboard and their roofs and fences of zinc. Residents in Zion, Trelawny, spoke to reporters standing over the piles of wet rubble that used to be their homes.

Chris’s friends in Rockfort thought there is something suspicious about the whole thing. They were told Melissa would arrive the week before, first it was Thursday or Friday, then Saturday, but the storm didn’t come until Tuesday. This is not how hurricanes work, they said. They also pointed to the absence of lightning and thunder. ‘Most people are saying it was a man-made storm,’ Chris said.

There are TikTok videos making similar claims, all fixated on a news story from seven years ago on the replication of hurricane-force winds in a lab in Miami. ‘In just two minutes, scientists can take calm waters and turn them into a monster hurricane,’ the reporter explains. ‘If they could do that seven years ago, imagine what they can do now,’ one TikToker says. Others blame the Jamaican government, claiming the storm is part of a plot to clear the ground for new forms of control and surveillance. Still others think the US is responsible, extending their attempts at ‘cloud seeding’ (see Operation Popeye in Vietnam) to reassert control over America’s backyard.

Before the hurricane arrived, two fisherman in Port Royal told the Jamaica Observer they were more concerned about US military attacks on vessels in the Caribbean Sea: ‘They have no need to kill the man dem but when you are a small country and they can step on you, they will. Trump is no different from Putin, they are the same thing.’ Trump may not be able to create hurricanes, but he can order your murder from on high.

People in Kingston thanked me for checking in but said they’d got off lightly. I asked them where to send donations and they suggested the government relief programme. Others vouched for a US-Jamaican organisation called Walk Good. Groups in Kingston have been co-ordinating donations and aid packages to be transported to the Western parishes. Crowdfunders for specific communities have been circulating on WhatsApp and social media, along with sayings like ‘Jamaicans a yard and abroad, each one help one.’ The government has urged people not to venture West unless necessary; heavy traffic is slowing down the official emergency response.

One man interviewed by the Jamaica Observer said that Black River cannot come back from this. People have needed to do a ‘little looting’ because they are hungry and there is no sign of government workers or services (‘looting’ doesn’t seem the right word for people calmly emptying the supermarkets to distribute food and water).

Denico sent me another message over the weekend. His family has enough food and water in the tank to get them through for now. I offered to send money but he said it wouldn’t be much use. Western Union has removed transfer fees, but there is nowhere for him to collect the cash.

On Monday the death toll stood at 28, but it is certain to be much higher. Many communities remain cut off and it is extremely difficult to clear all the roads. A friend in the blue mountains has said that the village of Regale is still inaccessible. No one has heard from Dove. There are tens of communities similarly marooned, with nowhere to do a little looting.

Early estimates suggest the losses might total $14 billion, equivalent to nearly three-quarters of the island’s yearly economic output. The worst affected regions are known as the island’s bread basket, and the damage will lead to a spike in food prices. Rising underground water in Manchester and St Elizabeth is causing renewed flooding although the rain has stopped, and while the relief efforts are heartening, the devastation is overwhelming. The road to recovery in western Jamaica looks tremendously long.