Trelawney Parish sits in a rural, agricultural region of Western Jamaica that borders the country’s largest contiguous rainforest. Under normal circumstances, the parish is relentlessly green — covered in lush vegetation and long rows of orange trees — but the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa has “almost completely annihilated” the area, according to firefighter Ronell Hamilton. “Everything here is brown right now. It looks like California.”
The strongest storm to strike Jamaica in recorded history, Melissa arrived on the island last week as a Category 5 storm with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour. As of press time, at least 67 people had been killed — 32 in Jamaica, 34 from flooding in Haiti, and one in the Dominican Republic — and thousands of homes have been flattened. In Black River, a coastal community south of Trelawney that is being called the storm’s epicenter, an estimated 90 percent of structures were destroyed. Thirty miles north, in Wakefield, Hamilton says that even buildings built to serve as hurricane shelters, such as the school and the fire station, were severely damaged.
Read more
