TL;DR – Hurricane Melissa Latest
- Hurricane Melissa has caused widespread devastation across western Jamaica, with 49 confirmed fatalities, including 19 in Jamaica.
- Many communities are in dire need of assistance, as local shelters struggle to accommodate displaced residents, with reports of damaged infrastructure and lack of communication with emergency teams.
- Efforts to provide relief are ramping up, but survivors voice urgent pleas for immediate help amid rising distress.
‘Send help’: The desperate pleas from Hurricane Melissa survivors
Driving through western c, it’s staggering how wide Hurricane Melissa’s field of destruction is.
Town after town, miles apart, where trees have been uprooted and roofs peeled back.
Some homes are now just a pile of rubble, and we still don’t know how deadly this storm has been, although authorities warn the death toll will likely rise.
A total of 49 people have died in Melissa’s charge across the Caribbean – 19 in Jamaica alone.
On the way, it’s clear that so many communities here have been brought to their knees and so many people are desperate for help.
We drive under a snarl of mangled power lines and over huge piles of rocks before reaching the town of Lacovia in Saint Elizabeth Parish.
At the side of the road, beside a battered and sodden primary school, a woman wearing a red shirt and black tracksuit bottoms holds a handwritten sign in the direction of passing cars.
“Help needed at this shelter,” it says. The woman’s name is Sheree McLeod, and she is an admin assistant at the school.
She is in charge of a makeshift shelter in the school, a temporary home for at least 16 people between the ages of 14 and 86.
I stop and ask what she needs and almost immediately she begins to cry. The primary school that has been housing those with no other place to stay.
‘No emergency teams’
“I’ve never seen this in my entire life,” she says. “It’s heartbreaking, I never thought in a million years that I would be in the situation trying to get help and with literally no communication.
“We can’t reach any officials, there are no emergency teams. I’m hoping and praying that help can reach us soon.
“The task of a shelter manager is voluntary and the most I can do is just ask for help in whatever way possible.”
Sheree shows me the classroom where she and 15 other people rode out the hurricane which she says hung over the town for hours.
They had just a sheet of tarpaulin against the window shutters to try to repel gusts of more than 170mph and a deluge of rain.
They took a white board off the wall to try to get more shelter.