Amid Flattened Homes, Jamaica Starts to Assess Hurricane Melissa’s Damage

The storm flattened and flooded seaside communities, leaving piles of brick, wood and twisted metal. Floodwaters gouged asphalt roads and knocked cars into muddy pits. An elementary school still stood, days later, but roaring winds had sheared the roof off and sent beams splintering onto the desks below.

As Jamaica worked on Thursday to assess the damage from Hurricane Melissa, it faced a long and daunting road to recovery, particularly in the western part of the country. That region was hardest hit by the hurricane, among the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic, and the memory of the 185 mile-per-hour winds and surging floodwaters was still vivid in residents’ minds.

Coleridge Minto, the police superintendent in St. Elizabeth Parish, said he had holed up with 32 other people at the police station in Black River, a town devastated by the hurricane. He recalled their fear “to listen to the whistle of the wind and observe the vehicles just moving, like swimming in a river.”

“We literally watched some buildings crumble in front of us,” he added.

The hurricane killed at least five people in Jamaica, and at least 30, including children, in Haiti, officials said. Another 20 people were missing and around 20 were injured, said Emmanuel Pierre, the director general of Haiti’s Civil Protection Office.

The storm also flooded cities and towns in eastern Cuba, leaving behind ruined homes and tangled electrical wires. About 2 million Cubans, or roughly a fifth of the country’s population, were in urgent need of shelter, food, water and health care because of the storm, the U.N.’s resident coordinator for Cuba, Francisco Pichón, said on Thursday.

Jamaican authorities were not able to provide “a proper update on the number of deaths so far” because they had not confirmed them all, Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s minister leading the emergency response, said on Thursday. But he said he expected the toll to rise, as the Jamaican military dispatched a helicopter to recover bodies.

Jamaican officials called St. Elizabeth, the southwestern parish where the hurricane made landfall on Tuesday, ground zero of the disaster. A courthouse, library, churches and other historic buildings had been reduced to rubble, and the parish capital, Black River, was decimated.

The town has long been known as the spot where the Black River meets the sea, and was once a key port where enslaved people packed sugar and rum onto ships. In recent years, it was known as a beloved spot for crocodile safaris or calm holidays at the Waterloo Guest House, which is said to have been the first private home in Jamaica lit by electricity.

But on Thursday, Black River was now unrecognizable to the people who knew it best.

The Waterloo Guest House was “just a pile of wood,” said Amiri Bradley, who was visiting the town. Boulders littered the coastline, and a cellphone tower had twisted into a semicircle. The hospital and fire station had either been destroyed or severely damaged, said the mayor, Richard Solomon. Emergency supplies were wiped out when a container carrying them was overturned by floodwaters.

Along the main street in Black River, supermarkets, furniture stores and other buildings were gone — “all of them, every single one of them,” Superintendent Minto said.

“The area is totally flat,” he said. “There is severe damage to infrastructure, almost all buildings, private properties as well as government buildings were severely damaged — in some cases totally demolished, or 80 to 90 percent damaged.”

Many of the people who took shelter at the Black River police station were neighbors who had nowhere else to go as the floodwaters rose, Superintendent Minto said.

“As their houses started to crumble, they made their way to the station, and that included children,” he said. “It was dangerous, but they took the risk.”

Across Jamaica, more than 170 communities have been “moderately or severely affected” by flooding or landslides, Mr. McKenzie, Jamaica’s minister leading the emergency response, said on Thursday. Most of them were in the parishes of Manchester, St. Elizabeth, St. James, Trelawny and Westmoreland, he added.

About 13,000 people were still in shelters on Thursday, although the number has gone down as many have gone back home, Mr. McKenzie said. He added it had been difficult to assess shelter occupancy in the most devastated parishes because “the communication is very difficult.” More than 400,000 Jamaicans were still without power on Thursday, officials said.

The Jamaican government said it was it was working with aid groups and others to secure and distribute food and medications to the hardest-hit regions. A “giant working group” will look at how to distribute more than 200,000 aid packages over the next few weeks, Matthew Samuda, the country’s minister of water, environment and climate change, told reporters.

Britain, France and several of Jamaica’s Caribbean neighbors have pledged assistance. The United States was also prepared to provide aid “directly and via local partners who can most effectively deliver it to those in need,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

He noted that U.S. law, which forbids nearly all commerce with Cuba, includes “exemptions and authorizations relating to private donations of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods to Cuba, as well as disaster response.”

Cuba’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Fernández de Cossio, indicated on social media that the country might be willing to accept U.S. assistance. “We have contacted the State Department and we are waiting for clarification on how and in what manner they are willing to help,” he wrote.

In Bayamo, Cuba, where the hurricane lifted metal roofs off homes or destroyed them entirely, Diana Iglesias, 50, was among the volunteers helping to clean up on Thursday. Her eldest son, she said, was cooking ham and spaghetti for lunch for about 100 people whose homes had flooded when the Bayamo River spilled over its banks.

“Cubans living abroad send donations,” she said. “Everybody does what they can. We help each other.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Crowley, Andre Paulte, Camille Williams and Anushka Patil.