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Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica on Tuesday as a monster Category 5 storm, with sustained winds topping out a 185 mph.
Melissa’s eye was on track to barrel almost straight through the entire tourist island.
About 3 feet of rain is expected to fall on Jamaica as Melissa rages and moves on as expected to ravage the rest of the Caribbean, with flooding and power outages already having mounted Monday before the storm even made landfall
Melissa has become the most powerful storm to hit Jamaica since records were first kept in 1850, with the local government ordering mandatory evacuations across many communities and cautioning of catastrophic dangers.
“There is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5,” Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness said ahead of the landfall.
World Meteorological Organization’s tropical cyclone specialist Anne-Claire Fontan put it more bluntly:
“For Jamaica, it will be the storm of the century,” she said.
The worst hurricane to hit Jamaica before Melissa was Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which was just a Category 3 but still destroyed at least a fifth of the island’s buildings.
Melissa is expected to move past Jamaica by Wednesday, then slam into southern Cuba, the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos and also lash the western coast of Haiti.
The US is expected to be spared a direct contact, though Florida will likely experience indirect effects like stormy seas and strong rip currents.
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