Even though Hurricane Melissa was the most powerful recorded storm to ever hit Jamaica when it made landfall after noon on Tuesday — a Category 5 monster packing 185 mph winds — Jamaican-American Bob Chung was worried, but not too worried, about his relatives there.
Especially folks like his uncle Alvin, who lived through the catastrophic Category 4 Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, until now the strongest storm Jamaicans had ever faced.
"He and my family, they learned their lessons and they've taken hurricane preparedness seriously ever since," Chung, who owns BobMar, a landscaping business in Miami, told WLRN.
Chung's uncle lives in Spalding, in the country's interior, just to the east of the northward path Melissa took through Jamaica after striking the island's southwest coast.
"When I last visited them there," Chung said, "my uncle's house had a concrete roof — he's like in a bunker — and you'd be surprised how many Jamaican houses have installed things like that during the construction boom there in the past 20, 25 years.
"So he told me before Melissa came, 'We'll be alright.'"
Most Jamaican houses, of course, don't have concrete roofs, which is why community leaders like economist Rosalea Hamilton, who heads the charitable LASCO Chin Foundation in the capital, Kingston, told WLRN that the country still was "not prepared, structurally and infrastructurally, for a hurricane of this magnitude."
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Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness also warned that no Caribbean country's infrastructure could likely withstand what Melissa was bringing.
Jamaican officials said they expect serious and widespread structural damage and destruction across the island, especially in the west. Before Melissa made landfall, three Jamaicans died during storm preparation accidents.
Still, Gilbert — and more recently Hurricane Beryl, another Category 4 storm that destructively lashed the same western zone of Jamaica last year — do seem to have equipped Jamaicans with a certain tranquil toughness-cum-tough tranquility amid the harrowing enormity of Melissa.
The slow-moving storm, which was also expected to pack more than 30 inches of rain and storm surge as high as 17 feet, is in fact the third-strongest hurricane to ever form in the Atlantic.
"Jamaicans are resilient people with a storied history of resourcefulness and fighting spirit that's in our DNA," said Marlon Hill, a Jamaican-American attorney in Miami who leads volunteer mobilization for the nonprofit South Florida Caribbean Strong, which is helping to direct post-Melissa relief efforts.
"But we shouldn't mistake that calmness for a lack of sense of urgency, which was definitely there. We helped repair more than 800 roofs in Jamaica last year after Beryl, and I do think we're getting better there in terms of storm resilience, which was very important at this moment."
Either way, many Jamaicans living in the capital, Kingston, on the island's southeastern coast, reported that friends and family in the central and western interior had decided not to evacuate in shelters, as government officials urged them to do.
Kingston resident Teddy Alexander told WLRN one relative living alone in her house in rural Mandeville — like Spalding, about 40 miles to the east of Melissa's eye — was confident she could make it through the storm in her house.
"She did say that the rain was lashing her house, and she realized because of that there was the possibility of landslides in the mountainous area there," Alexander said.
"But she felt her home was well constructed enough to keep her and her dog and cat safe."
A Marshall Plan for the Caribbean
Hill, though, said even if Jamaicans like her do come through OK, the general destruction elsewhere could be such that "this is really going to warrant a Marshall Plan of U.S. and international investment for the Caribbean, to recover and rebuilt not just in Jamaica, but Haiti, Cuba, the Bahamas."
Melissa is forecast to strike southeast Cuba and the southeastern Bahamas after leaving Jamaica.
The "Marshall Plan" Hill refers to is a growing topic in the Caribbean, where leaders say their small island nations are bearing the brunt of sea-level rise and more intense storms wrought by the climate change created mostly by larger and more developed countries.
"On behalf of the 1.8 million Americans of Jamaican descent, I do think this would be a fair request of our nation.
"If anything we're going to need help recovering the jobs and supply chains that are going to be lost — especially considering how the U.S. economy benefits from the Caribbean economy in areas like tourism."
Montego Bay, one of Jamaica's most popular resort sites, is expected to be the last area Melissa pounds as it exits the island's north coast.
Hill said South Florida Caribbean Strong and other nonprofit relief groups, such as Global Empowerment Mission (GEM) and American Friends of Jamaica, are asking the public for both cash and supplies donations in the aftermath of Melissa. (A South Florida Caribbean Strong website has a list of items that can be ordered on Amazon.)
He added the groups also needs the public's "time."
"We're going to be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday, and we need volunteers to help us assemble items to load into the planes we already have ready to go to the priority areas in Jamaica."
In Kingston, Hamilton of the LASCO Chin Foundation said the one silver lining of last year's otherwise disastrous Beryl experience was that it honed Jamaicans' relief delivery organization and skills for Melissa.
"It will be easier for us to rally as a nation after this," she told WLRN, "and that's already what we're doing."
For more information on how to help the Hurricane Melissa relief effort in South Florida, go to WLRN.org
