Hurricane Melissa wreaked havoc in Jamaica. How long will recovery take?
Will Hurricane Melissa be Jamaica’s Maria?
Hurricane Melissa brought floods, storm surges and high winds to Jamaica Tuesday, pushing the island nation to the brink of catastrophe.
The category 5 storm was the strongest in Jamaica’s recorded history, coming ashore with maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour.
“I don’t think any structure is designed for that wind load, especially a residential one,” says Northeastern professor Qin Jim Chen, an expert in coastal resiliency.
The National Hurricane Center also predicted 20 to 30 inches of rain in some locations and storm surges of nine to 13 feet along the south coast of Jamaica, resulting in flash flooding and landslides.
Under threat are not only the lives of residents and tourists, but the infrastructure needed to sustain life—buildings, roads, power lines, communication systems, fuel supply depots, water supplies and food crops.
Risk to infrastructure
“The risk here is that you have a storm that basically takes out all of the infrastructure at the same time,” says Stephen Flynn, political science professor and founding director of Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute.
“We’re really looking, potentially, at a scenario that looks very much like Hurricane Maria” and the destruction it unleashed on Puerto Rico and Dominica in 2017, he says.
Jamaica’s main power plant is 25 miles east of Kingston. The capital city is not expected to take the brunt of the storm, but the plant’s location on the waterfront makes it vulnerable to storms, Flynn says.
As of late Tuesday afternoon, one-third of the country was without power, according to the BBC.
If there’s one thing people have learned from Hurricane Maria’s devastating assault on Puerto Rico, it’s the cascade of losses that arise from failed infrastructure, he says.
“When you lose power, the power to run water pumps goes away and so then you lose water. Water provides coolant for power systems. So then you don’t have power systems,” Flynn says.
“You have backup generators, but they require fuel. The fuel has to be transported, but transportation systems are knocked down. Now there’s no fuel to pump into vehicles, even emergency vehicles,” he says.
“It’s a very sobering scenario,” Flynn says.
Slow speed fuels ferocity
At mid-day, Hurricane Melissa’s maximum sustained winds were already 28 miles per hour over the 157-miles-per-hour standard needed to boost the storm into the top category on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
The relative slowness of the storm that moved along at seven to nine miles per hour instead of the average 11 to 12 miles per hour meant the winds had time to wreak more havoc.
“The wind is just blowing over your structures and your buildings for a long period of time, so it’s going to cause more damage,” Chen says.
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Hovering storms also have time to release more rain, like Hurricane Harvey, which caused catastrophic flooding in 2017 in Houston, he says.
The lack of speed is caused by a relatively weak background wind, Chen says. With a slower than normal push from behind, Hurricane Melissa also had an extended period to push seawater against the coastline and produce a storm surge.
Warming oceans play a role too, since hurricanes draw on the water’s surface heat to create the energy to form their whirling vortexes, Chen says. The sea over which Hurricane Melissa formed is 1.4% warmer than average, according to the Climate Center.
Mountain effect
Jamaica’s mountains also make it susceptible to damaging effects from hurricanes.
“Many villages are built right along riverbanks which makes them naturally vulnerable to flash floods when you have 30-plus inches of rain in a very hilly place,” Flynn says.
In addition, hurricane winds intensify with height, strengthening by as much as 30% atop and on the windward side of mountains, according to the hurricane center.
“I don’t think any structures are designed for that wind except for maybe concrete,” says Chen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and marine and environmental sciences.
Later in the afternoon winds dropped to 150 miles per hour and the hurricane level was reduced to a category 4, according to the hurricane center.
The impact on the economy could be significant, Flynn says. “Jamaica is so dependent on tourism and dependent on agriculture.”
The north-northeast path Hurricane Melissa took across Jamaica cut through the heart of the agricultural region and exited the island on the way to Cuba at Montego Bay, a major vacation destination.
“It’s hard to imagine how devastating these storms can be,” Flynn says, adding that Hurricane Maria damaged 95% of housing and defoliated forests after landing on Dominica as a category 5 storm in 2017, before arriving in Puerto Rico as a category 4 storm.
The U.S. and international aid community can assist in getting Jamaica back on its economic footing, Flynn says. “Jamaicans are resilient, but they will need outside help.”
