Hurricane Melissa didn’t just pummel Jamaica and lash eastern Cuba. It tested whether the Caribbean’s infrastructure, crisis governance, and international partners have learned anything since Maria, Dorian, and Beryl.
Early answer: not enough. With Jamaica enduring a historic Category 5 landfall and Cuba facing a second strike before the storm pushes toward the Bahamas and brushes Bermuda, the region is being asked to weather the new normal with old tools, and that’s a losing bet.
A Historic Strike and a Familiar Failure Loop
Melissa’s numbers are staggering. It blasted Jamaica with one of the most powerful Atlantic landfalls on record, with peak winds near 185 mph and extraordinarily low central pressure at landfall. The storm then crossed into southeastern Cuba as a major hurricane and is now tracking toward the Bahamas before passing near Bermuda. The National Hurricane Center warned of catastrophic flooding, landslides, and storm surge up to 13 feet on Jamaica’s south coast. Eastern Cuba braced for as much as 20 inches of rain. Parts of Hispaniola were pummeled days before the eye approached. Preliminary tallies indicate multiple deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic from landslides and falling trees during Melissa’s slow, grim approach. Jamaica’s prime minister has issued an all clear for restoration to begin, even as towns like Black River report damage so severe that search and rescue centers themselves were knocked offline. This is the vicious loop. A storm devastates, systems strain, recovery starts too late, and the next storm arrives sooner than the infrastructure recovers.
What Worked: Early Warnings, Tough Calls
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Jamaica’s government activated shelters, closed airports, and pushed evacuation guidance as Melissa’s rapid intensification snapped models into a worst case track. Local officials dredged flood channels and staged hospitals for emergency mode. Cuba mobilized mass evacuations across eastern provinces. The Bahamas rolled out warnings with a focus on storm surge and rainfall. This is the hard, unglamorous work of preparedness. And yet, it was not enough to prevent widespread power failures, roof loss, and blocked roads, because when a Category 5 comes onshore, prepared is a relative term.
The Climate Reality: Rapid Intensification Is Now a Policy Problem
Meteorologically, Melissa reads like a case study in our hotter ocean era. Explosive intensification over anomalously warm waters. Eyewall replacement cycles that enlarge the wind field. A slow crawl that multiplies rainfall and landslide risk. This is not a one off. The 2025 Atlantic season has produced several Category 5 storms, and the Caribbean’s risk profile is shifting from occasional catastrophe to serial multiyear stress test. That should force a pivot in policy. Not just rebuilding, but pre building. Elevating critical infrastructure, hardening the grid, moving substations, modernizing water systems, designing shelters for multi week operations, and ring fencing budgets for surge repairs that no longer count as once in a century.
Power, Ports, And The Post Landfall Bottleneck
Where hurricanes become humanitarian crises is not the eyewall. It’s the bottleneck after. Jamaica saw reports of impassable roads and containerized relief supplies tossed and ruined in Black River. Ports and airports, lifelines for island economies, shut down for days. External partners have assessment teams in the region. That’s good, but Caribbean countries shouldn’t have to rely on episodic military airlift to stabilize critical supply lines. This is the case for a regional disaster logistics compact. Pre positioned surge depots elevated above storm surge. Hardened multimodal nodes to pivot between sea, air, and overland when any one fails. Standardized mutual aid protocols that activate automatically at NHC Category 4 plus landfall.
The Equity Ledger: Who Pays, Who Waits
The progressive argument here is obvious but still under enforced. Those who contributed least to climate change are paying most, fastest, and with interest. A Jamaican family rebuilding the same roof twice in five years is subsidizing the world’s carbon ledger. That demands more than sympathy. It requires debt relief triggers tied to climate disasters, faster disbursement from loss and damage facilities, and concessional finance for climate resilient infrastructure. If the G7 can mobilize liquidity overnight to prevent financial panics, it can do the same to prevent infrastructure collapse after a Category 5. And donors must stop funding yesterday’s standards. If your grant requires a like for like rebuild after Melissa, you’re financing the next failure.
What To Watch Next: Bahamas, Bermuda, And Secondary Hazards
- Bahamas: Forecast guidance points to hurricane conditions in the southeast and central islands with five to ten inches of rain and five to eight feet of surge in vulnerable areas. Low lying communities, especially those still recovering from Dorian, face compounding risk.
- Bermuda: A close pass late Thursday could bring hurricane force gusts and coastal flooding. Bermuda’s building code is world class, but expect power interruptions and marine hazards.
- Hispaniola and Jamaica: Not done. Rivers will run high for days. Landslides often occur after skies clear. Heat returns quickly, which complicates recovery for people without power or safe water.
The Political Question: Normalize Resilience, Not Disaster
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. The Caribbean is now the world’s proving ground for climate era governance. Leaders who make the case for pre disaster investment, stronger codes, buried lines, elevated stations, redundancies, will be accused of overspending in quiet years. But the quiet years are gone. The budget math flips when storms like Melissa are no longer outliers but the tail wagging the dog. You can pay to lift critical systems above the surge, or you can pay to replace them every two to three years. One path protects democratic legitimacy by keeping courts open, schools operating, hospitals powered. The other corrodes it under permanent emergency.
We’re very good at telling the story after the roof is gone. The standard we should expect in Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, and from the capitals that control climate finance, is whether the roof was designed not to fail in the first place. Melissa is not just a weather event. It’s a referendum on whether we’ve learned the lesson of the last decade of storms.