Scenes From the Caribbean, as Hurricane Melissa Hits

Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday as a Category 5 storm, bringing lashing waves, powerful 185-mile-per-hour winds and life-threatening flooding to the Caribbean island nation.

The powerful storm, with winds stronger than Hurricane Katrina at its peak, remained catastrophically strong as it spun over the island, carving a slow path toward Cuba, where nearly 900,000 people have been ordered to evacuate.

Melissa is the fourth of this year’s five Atlantic hurricanes to go through what experts describe as a “rapid intensification.”

For people on the islands, recovery and cleanup efforts and damage estimates are just beginning to take shape.

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