 |
| Photo of extreme winds from Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica. The photographer, Josh Morgerman said this was actually before the peak of the winds. |
As of this morning, the death toll from Hurricane Melissa rose past 30 as of this morning, but we still do not have a full accounting of the toll in Jamaica, the hardest hit island in the Caribbean.
Communications there are still spotty, and many roads are blocked. Which means reaching the hardest hit areas is difficult to say the least.
Most of the reported deaths so far are in Haiti. Per USA Today:
"Though Melissa did not directly hit Haiti, the Caribbeans' most populous nation, the storm battered the island with days of rain. On Wednesday, authorities reported at least 25 deaths, largely due to floods in Petit-Goave, a coastal town about 40 miles west of the capital, where a river burst its banks."
Several people are still missing in Haiti, and thousands of homes are damaged and destroyed.
That's still nothing compared to scope of the destruction in parts of Jamaica. The search and recovery of victims in Jamaica really hasn't started in earnest yet.
Weather and climate journalist Jonathan Petramala, in a YouTube video posted this morning, said he and many others had been trying for more than 12 hours to reach the hardest hit coastline of Jamaica. The roads to the southwest coast are an impenetrable mass of mud, twisted trees, water and debris.
That's bad news, because survivors on the southwest coast are most in need of help. In the Jamaican town Petramala was reporting from, survivors said they had no drinking water and no food amid the now roofless houses and debris-clogged landscape. Dead goats, drowned in the storm, littered the neighborhood
The storm itself had to be terrifying. Josh Morgerman, a hurricane expert who has now experienced the eyes 83 hurricanes, described Melissa as easily among the scariest he's experienced. On Facebook, he wrote about the scene just before the hurricane reached peak intensity.
"Bone-rattling gusts were making roofs explode into clouds of lethal confetti. The grand palm tree out front was starting to bend obscenely - in a way I found unnatural."
Then the peak of the storm hit. Morgerman described it this way:
"The hurricane's inner eyewall was a screaming white void. All I could see through the cracks in the shutters was the color white - accompanied by a constant, ear-splitting scream that actually caused pain. ....The scream occasionally got higher and angrier and those extra-screechy screams made my eardrums pulse. Meanwhile, water was forcing in through every crack - under the floor and between the window slats."
Drone video taken after skies cleared made it look like a 30 mile wide EF-4 tornado had smashed through western Jamaica.
Jamaicans are doing what they can to start recovering from then catastrophe. The capital, Kingston, was not all that badly damaged by Melissa, so the seat of government is able to coordinate relief and logistics.
Video from Jamaica showed people already starting to work on replacing roofs on homes. Bulldozers were pushing mud off roads. People with chainsaws and machetes were hacking their way through walls of fallen trees that were blocking roads.
At least eight Jamaican hospitals had power restored as of today. Kingston's airport reopened today, allowing planes loaded with aid to land. Ten commercial flights are also scheduled, so tourists can leave the island.
The airport in hard-hit Montego Bay also opened to relief flights today, but commercial flights are still a no-go, so tourists are still stranded there.
All this is a start, but it might take years for Jamaica to fully recover. And I'm not even really including the damage Melissa caused in Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas.
MELISSA'S ENDGAME
Hurricane Melissa is persistent as hell.
Top winds had dropped to 90 mph as it was interacting with islands in the Bahamas. But despite strong upper level winds that tend to rip hurricanes apart, Melissa managed to strengthen its winds to 105 mph by late this morning.
Melissa might even get a little stronger in the next few hours. But colder ocean water temperatures and howling upper level winds will make the storm lose its tropical characteristics as it passes by Bermuda tonight.
It'll still be a hurricane force storm when it clips the southeast corner of Newfoundland Friday night or Saturday as it races northeastward over the Atlantic.
VIDEO
YouTube video, much of it taken from drone, of the devastation in Haiti from Hurricane Melissa. Click on this link to view. Or if you see the image below, click on that.
No comments:
Post a Comment