When Hurricane Melissa reached Jamaica on Tuesday, it was the most powerful weather system to hit the island since records began.
Ava Brown, in St Catherine parish, says her neighbourhood has been turned upside down. “Most of my neighbours’ roofs are gone. Crops and animals have drowned. Roads are impassable. People have died. I heard an unconfirmed report that one of the hospitals is almost unusable. It’s a disaster.”
Darin, in St Catherine’s Treasure Beach, says the community is coming together to deal with the destruction. “In the house I lived in, I lost the ceiling and the roof, so it’s not livable. People are walking the streets right now, looking around to see how they can help each other. There is a lot of devastation.”
For the Guardian’s Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan, enduring the hurricane meant balancing her work as a reporter and her role as a mother looking after her daughter.
She tells Nosheen Iqbal about her experience of Melissa and what she discovered in the aftermath when she tried to meet residents on the island’s devastated south-west coast. They also discuss how Jamaica will recover from this disaster and what the climate crisis means for the future of the region.
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