Cuba was cleaning its flooded and debris-filled streets this Wednesday while Hurricane Melissa, after causing the death of at least 20 people in Haiti and devastating entire areas of Jamaica, is now heading towards the Bahamas. The storm has now been downgraded to Category 1 of 5.
With machetes in hand, the residents of Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second city, help each other clear the streets full of trees and branches. Parts of the houses have collapsed, tin roofs twisted by strong winds are on the ground and the city is without electricity, with many poles lying on the ground. The surrounding rivers have overflowed and in some places the water is waist-deep. There the drowned sheep lay on the asphalt.
The roof of the house of Mariela Reyes, a 55-year-old housewife, flew off and fell with a crash to the adjacent street. “It’s not easy to lose everything you have. The little you have,” says Mariela Reyes discouraged. On Tuesday, he had stored his television and other appliances at his sister’s house.
Melissa is now off the eastern coast of Cuba with winds of 155 km/h, but torrential rains continue to hit the island, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).
Melissa headed toward the Bahamas, where a dangerous storm is expected today, according to the NHC, and will then head toward Bermuda, where it should arrive Thursday night, with slight strengthening possible. In the Bahamas, “residents should take shelter,” the NHC warns, and in Bermuda “preparations should be completed before the first expected tropical storm winds occur.”
“Immense destruction”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared that the hurricane had caused “considerable damage,” but so far he has not deplored any human cost. In Haiti, not directly hit by the center of the hurricane but seriously affected by heavy rains, at least twenty people, including ten children, have died and ten are missing, according to the director general of Civil Protection, Emmanuel Pierre. The flooding of the La Digue River swept away several houses in the coastal town of Petit-Goâve, according to residents.
“People died and houses were washed away,” said one of them, Steeve Louissaint.
Three people died in Panama, three in Jamaica and one in the Dominican Republic. Hurricane Melissa was the strongest to make landfall in 90 years when it hit Jamaica on Tuesday as a Category 5, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with sustained winds of around 300 km/h.
“There has been immense and unprecedented destruction of infrastructure, property, roads, communications and energy networks,” Dennis Zulu, UN coordinator in several Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, said by video from Kingston.
“People are in shelters across the country and right now our preliminary assessments show that the country has been devastated at levels never seen before,” he added, citing an initial estimate of one million people affected.
“Stay strong. We will rebuild, we will rise again,” wrote Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness in “Everything has disappeared,” he explains in written messages, accompanied by photographs.
Dana Morris Dixon, Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, indicated that “the damage is significant in western Jamaica”, but stressed that the capital, Kingston, “did not suffer serious damage.”
According to Desmond McKenzie, Minister for Local Government, many infrastructures have been “severely affected” in Montego Bay, where a hospital “has been devastated”, he says, “for lack of another word”.
More than 25,000 people are in shelters because “many houses have been destroyed,” he said. “The road will not be easy. Given the extent of the damage, it will take a long time.” The minister also noted “that in the midst of all this, a baby was born safely under emergency conditions. So there she is… a baby Melissa.”
A “tragic reminder”
The United States “sent relief and intervention teams to affected areas, as well as vital supplies,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in X.
The UK will provide emergency financial aid of 2.5 million pounds (2.8 million euros) to affected countries, the Foreign Office said on Wednesday.
In a message posted on social media, King Charles III, who said he was “deeply saddened by the catastrophic damage,” said that “this unprecedented storm, the most terrible ever recorded, reminds us that it is increasingly urgent to restore the balance and harmony of nature.” The head of UN Climate made the connection between the disaster and the major UN climate conference COP30, in a few days in Brazil.
“Every climate disaster is a tragic reminder of the urgency of limiting every fraction of a degree of warming, caused mainly by the burning of excessive amounts of coal, oil and gas,” said Simon Stiell, a native of the island of Carriacou, Grenada, hit by a hurricane last year.
With the warming of the ocean surface, the frequency of more intense hurricanes (or cyclones or typhoons), with more violent winds and greater precipitation, increases, but not the total number of cyclones, according to the climate expert group commissioned by the UN, the IPCC.
Source: BFM TV
