I was on the phone with one of our IT people today. Though he lives in Seattle, he is from Jamaica. He’s a little worried about his house back there. I hope his house survives. (And everyone who lives in Jamaica, too.)
Here’s a live webcam from Kingston, which is on the southern side of the island.
And another from a less prosperous neighborhood.
I looked for webcams from Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, which are both on the north side, and didn’t find any, not yet anyway.
I keep looking in on those two video feeds and so far, everything has been really mild? Medium rain, light wind. I would have expected things to have been bad by now.
I have used this site for first person reports:
Brian
It hit around 1 PM EST (noon Carribbean time) today
Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Tuesday afternoon as a powerful Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 185 m.p.h.
Melissa is the strongest hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic season to date — and has now become the most powerful to strike Jamaica since tropical records began for the Atlantic basin.
It looks like the worst of it missed Kingston.
I just checked out the webcams that I posted above, and while I was watching, someone wiped off the lens.
Yeah, Kingston always looked pretty calm every time I looked. It was getting pretty rough on the other one (wherever it is) the last time I saw it, but now that feed is down, with a message that further live video is expected.
(ETA and now it is back up, and calmer there.)
Thanks for the link. There’s no substitute for news from someone who’s right there.
896 millibars is 26.45 inches of mercury. That is some VERY low air pressure.
If you’re interested in donating, I would recommend Doctors Without Borders or World Central Kitchen for immediate assistance, and Habitat for Humanity for long-term aid.
Here is a look at a small town on the coast, Black River. Surprising there were relatively few deaths (50 total so far in Jamaica and Haiti)
Yeah, with Melissa being hyped as one of the worst storms ever I was expecting hundreds. That’s a lot fewer deaths than the US South got after Helene had degraded to a tropical storm.
I will say that there may be places with sizable death tolls that we don’t know about, because nobody can get in or out. I kind of figured that the whole island was going to look like central Joplin after the 2011 tornado, and thankfully, it doesn’t.
There was also a lot of concern about the Kingston airport, and when I looked at a map, it was really obvious why. That airport appears to have been built on a sandbar, with the runway on an artificial peninsula. Thankfully, it has reopened.
Getting the airport reopened was probably priority one, for obvious reasons.
A problem with emphasizing peak wind speed is that with Mellisa the Cat 1 hurricane is 100 miles across, the surrounding tropical storm is 250 miles across, and the majorly deathly destructive Cat 4/5 core zone is 20 miles across.
Landfall of the center was far enough from Kingston & Manley International Airport that they only experienced a strong tropical storm.
Meanwhile Black River was devastated and the storm carved a 20-mile wide swath of abject wreckage acoss the island towards the northeast.
So basically a 20-mile-wide tornado ran over Jamaica, with torrential rain as a bonus.
Could say that. That overpowered core entered over the west part of Jamaica and crossed the island along the “short” axis so Kingston and points east got “normal” hurricane/TS conditions which is no picnic but the islands are usually prepared to battle through. Contrast Maria which crossed Puerto Rico diagonally along the “long” axis so a greater portion experienced core or near-core conditions.
Yep. With widespread torrential rain and hence widespread flooding.
Plus widespread winds sufficient to cause nuisance damage to well-built stuff and large amounts of medium damage to flimsy stuff. In a country whose infrastructure is flimsy and held together with bailing wire and chewing gum that can lead to an awful lot of e.g. utility wire pole damage everywhere that will take years to fully repair.
Had the 20 mile core-of-doom gone right over the capital & airport & other key national infrastructure, then the recovery time and cost would have been vastly larger. As would have been the death toll.
Realizing that most hurricanes fit this kind of description was quite a surprise for me. In many cases, the most destructive part is the storm surge, and I’m not hearing much about it with this storm (yet). That was DEFINITELY why Sandy was so disastrous, even though the winds were no longer hurricane-force when it struck the NYC area.
p.s. I remember reading in “The Perfect Storm” that a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon could take up a million cubic miles of atmosphere. That’s stuck with me.