Hurricane Melissa

Chris texted me five days before the edge of the storm reached Jamaica. ‘Hurricane Melissa is coming. Can you spot me £50 to stack up on some food please?’ I checked projections from the US National Hurricane Centre, hoping the storm would blow further west. The hurricane approached slowly. It paused, lingered, crawled. I texted friends to ask if they were prepared. I told them to stay safe. It was magical thinking, like saying ‘have a safe flight.’

Shana was worried because her small house in rural St Catherine was exposed on one side, a sheet of loosely fitting zinc where a wall should be. She tried to reinforce it, using bags of clothes to wedge it from the inside and two sandbags on the outside. Before the storm arrived she told me water was already starting to come through. She wouldn’t leave her house to go to the nearest shelter, though. ‘The looters are already out,’ she said. She would stay put with her five-year-old daughter, a zinc barrier to shield them from 175mph winds and three feet of rain.

‘Are you as prepared as you can be?’ I asked Ossie in Kingston. ‘With this type of system,’ he replied, ‘Cat. 5, you can prepare but it comes down to “be prepared for anything goes”.’ Like others, he asked how I was doing, how my family was.

By Monday night, it was clear Melissa would hit the island head on. It was a matter of time before we lost contact. Charged batteries and phone credit can’t compensate for power outages and downed cell towers – unless Elon Musk’s Starlink comes good with its promise to provide free internet to Jamaica and the Bahamas through November.

I asked Chris in Portmore – built on reclaimed swamp – about storm surges. ‘I live close to a canal but not too close to the sea,’ he said. I hoped he was right, but worried the compulsory evacuation orders only covered the inevitably doomed. Port Royal was evacuated. Half of it has been under the sea since the earthquake and tsunami of 1692.

A Category 5 hurricane had never before made landfall in Jamaica. Someone on Instagram joked: ‘I can’t wait till we get back to precedented times.’ The prime minister asked people to pray. Jamaicans are resilient, he said. The government would reduce damage to life and property. But public order must be maintained.

In the Blue Mountains, in the regular rainy season, landslides block roads and coffee farms flood. I wondered what a metre of rain would do to villages with names like ‘Cascade’, villages established after emancipation by people who moved up into the hills, away from the plantation and towards a kind of peasant freedom.

By yesterday morning, the tone of messages had shifted. The storm had arrived, the wind was ‘something different’, and this was still only its outer reaches. There were a few hours more until it made landfall. Everyone was waiting.

Social media feeds were clogged with AI-generated videos of devastated airport runways and sharks in hotel swimming pools. The top hits on TikTok, believable enough if you have never been to Jamaica, showed people running for cover, roofs being blown off, piercing screams and shouts of ‘Oh my God!’ in American accents.

BBC News ran Hurricane Melissa as its top story. ‘The birds have all gone,’ a British tourist said. Nick Davis, the BBC’s man in Jamaica when they need one, wrote:

Journalists say we should never ‘be the story’, but this time my life and my family and friends are the top line, because Hurricane Melissa is a threat to our lives here. I'd like to dedicate this first live page dispatch to my cousin Andrew, who works for the power company, away from his girls, to make sure the infrastructure we need is in place when we need it.

Shana texted me: ‘I can hear trees breaking and zinc flying. The wind sounds like its talking.’ On the videos people sent, it sounded more like screeching. Chris: ‘An almond tree broke in half next door. It was three storeys high.’

The hurricane made landfall further west than anticipated, sparing Kingston and St Catherine the worst of the winds. Realising the eye of the storm would pass directly over St Elizabeth –the parish worst hit by Hurricane Beryl last year – I texted Denico who lives in Holland Bamboo, a small village there. The WhatsApp messages stayed on one tick. According to the Jamaica Information Service, 70 per cent of homes had lost power in the parishes of St Elizabeth, Manchester, Westmoreland, Hanover and St James.

Videos appeared on X of the towns nearest Denico. In Santa Cruz, the streets ran like rivers. In Black River, the parish capital, a man filmed from a hospital as the wind hurled trees and roofing through the air; a few hours later there were videos showing the devastation of the city. It’s unlikely Denico will have service for some time and until he does there is no way to know if he’s OK. His five-year-old daughter, my goddaughter, lives with her mother further east in St Catherine, not too far from Shana, and she managed to sleep through the night.

The destruction will take months to recover from. Electricity, water and telecoms are interrupted across much of the island. Thousands of trees have been uprooted, acres of fields flooded, harvests of plantain, banana and pumpkin destroyed. Many people will have lost everything. When the rain stops, the wind dies and the waters recede, Jamaicans will re-emerge to assess the damage, check on their neighbours and begin the slow process of rebuilding. On TikTok, their AI doubles will no doubt be looting.