Hurricane Melissa is twisting across Cuba, its eye passing over the long, thin island’s eastern shores. Cubans are huddled in the dark, many far from home. The country evacuated about 750,000 people, who are now searching for safety as winds whip and land slides in the fierce rain. Cuba’s president said it would be a “very difficult night.”
As dawn arrives in the Caribbean, the damage will become clearer. Yesterday, the storm’s center sliced through Jamaica, where boats washed ashore, roofs blew away and trees splintered under 185 m.p.h. winds. Officials reported catastrophic damage. Most people there are cut off from the internet and major airports are closed.
Melissa lost some of its strength as it crossed Jamaica, and it is now propelled by 115 m.p.h. winds. While hurricanes often pick up speed and strength over water, they can slow when they meet the resistance of land, trees and towns. The storm is crossing “rugged terrain” in Cuba, officials said, and it is expected to continue to slow as it moves north. Melissa’s rain is also reaching Haiti, parts of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos.
What happened?
Melissa is one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record — stronger than Katrina, which pummeled New Orleans in 2005 — and the most powerful ever to hit Jamaica. On the map of the storm, its angry red center seemed to consume the entire outline of the island.
The full scale of the damage is difficult to know. The storm knocked power and cut communications for much of Jamaica, making it hard for officials to assess the extent of the destruction. It also complicated our reporting. Yesterday, during The Times’s daily news meeting, our top editor asked for an update on the storm. An international editor replied that our reporter on the ground had lost signal. “We’re hoping to hear from him soon,” she added.
A few hours later, our team did hear from Jovan Johnson, who was in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. He sent us this update late last night:
Several of us who camped out in our newsroom tried to step outside Tuesday, but we just couldn’t conquer the howling wind. Power grew unstable, phone calls dropped easily. Then came images of despair — damaged hospitals, schools, homes. I saw a clip of the roof of my former high school lifted to the sky. I went into Tuesday’s dark night without power, worried about the scale of the destruction that Wednesday will unveil.
Photos and videos emerging on social media have begun to document the damage, showing damaged cars and debris. Parts of Jamaica are “under water,” a disaster-response leader said in an afternoon news conference. Flooding and storm surges damaged at least three hospitals, and local response teams said the country’s health care system was having “one of its most severe crises in recent memory.” Jamaica’s prime minister declared the country a disaster area.
We’ll get a clearer sense of the damage in Cuba, too, later this morning. You can follow updates here.
A displacement disaster
The storm has forced many people from their homes, as officials repeatedly warned residents to find safe cover.
In Jamaica, only 15,000 people had entered the country’s 800 shelters by yesterday afternoon. The country has a population of nearly three million. But in Cuba, hundreds of thousands of people left their homes. Some boarded crowded buses, while others packed a few belongings into plastic bags and hiked up muddy mountains, searching for safety. See photos.
Today, Melissa threatens to overwhelm Cuba’s fragile infrastructure. Before the storm, the nation had already been battling a deepening economic crisis and frequent blackouts. The storm has plunged much of the country into darkness, with power failures reported in the east, according to the national electricity company.
It’s a disaster that leaders in the Caribbean have been warning for years could be coming. Melissa was strengthened by Caribbean water temperatures far warmer than usual, a sign of climate change’s burden on small island countries. “It has become a tired adage, but nonetheless true. The world’s poorest countries will suffer the most from climate change despite being least responsible for it,” our colleagues Max Bearak and Lisa Friedman write.
What is next
Budget cuts and reduced donations will limit the amount of food that aid agencies like the World Food Program can provide to people facing hunger, contaminated water and disease outbreaks. The U.N. stored disaster aid in Barbados before hurricane season and is looking to deliver it to Jamaica when airports reopen.
Still, Trump said the U.S. was prepared to help Jamaica. “On a humanitarian basis, we have to, so we’re watching it closely,” he said.
Melissa is expected to remain an intensely destructive force in the coming days as it passes through the Caribbean, while bypassing the United States.
For more: See the wall of wind and rain inside Melissa’s eye. (This video was our most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday.)
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Wildfire fighters in the U.S. are getting sick and dying young.
To find out what they’re exposed to, Times reporters brought sensors to the Green fire, an average-size blaze, this summer. They tracked levels of some of the most lethal particles in the air, called PM2.5, which are so tiny that they can enter the bloodstream and cause lasting damage. On the fire line, readings were often triple the concentration considered hazardous. (Our reporters wore respirators — which the firefighters don’t have.)
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Toast grilled cheese in the oven.
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GAMES
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was billionth.
And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands.
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.
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Amelia Nierenberg contributed to this newsletter.
Lauren Jackson is an editor for The Morning and the host of Believing at The New York Times.
Evan Gorelick is a New York-based writer for The Morning, the flagship daily newsletter of The Times.
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