Category Five Hurricane Melissa Threatens Jamaica with Catastrophic Damage

What Happened?

Hurricane Melissa, a major category five hurricane with maximum sustained winds of over one hundred seventy-five miles an hour, is expected to make landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday. The storm is already the strongest on the planet for 2025 and could potentially be the most powerful hurricane to hit Jamaica since records began being kept in 1851. 

Catastrophic flooding and storm surges are expected, along with widespread power and communications outages, in addition to infrastructure damage. The storm underwent rapid intensification in the past few days to reach category five status, which is the strongest type of hurricane.

Why it Matters

Hurricane Melissa has the potential to interfere with U.S. Navy combat operations in the Caribbean, though the storm poses little risk to Navy vessels because they can easily track the storm’s path and stay out of harm's way. If the storm does inflict severe damage on Jamaica, there is a chance U.S. forces could be called on to deliver emergency aid to the island nation, and that could pull those forces temporarily away from their mission near Venezuela. 

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For Jamaica itself, the storm has strong enough winds to cause complete structural failure of both buildings and infrastructure, including bridges, highways, and overpasses. Widespread and long-lasting power and communications outages are likely as well, which can make it more difficult to coordinate rescue and relief efforts. Jamaica has a population of nearly three million people, and Hurricane Melissa is poised to inflict the most damage on the eastern half of the island, which includes the capital city of Kingston.

The storm itself intensified from category one to category five in just over a single day, a trend which has become the new norm in the warm waters of the Caribbean. Tropical waters fuel storm growth because warmer air can hold more moisture, which enables small atmospheric disturbances to grow into monster storms like Hurricane Melissa. Satellite imagery showed the hurricane was larger than the island of Jamaica itself, and it was moving at a slow enough rate that landfall could be for an extended time, which increases the flooding threat.

Meteorological forecast models show the storm tracking to the northeast and out to the Atlantic after contacting Jamaica, which means the storm should not pose any risks to the eastern coast of the United States, especially nearby Florida. 

How it Affects You

For the year of 2025, hurricane season has largely spared the southeastern United States from any damage or disruptions. But with a full month still to go in hurricane season, Hurricane Melissa has demonstrated that there is still plenty of potential for large-scale storms to develop and impact inhabited portions of the Caribbean or the southeastern United States.

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