Jamaican Officials Worry That Not Enough People Are Evacuating Ahead of Melissa

Officials in Jamaica have raised concerns that not enough residents in low-lying areas are complying with mandatory evacuation orders. Hurricane Melissa is barreling toward the island nation, threatening to become the strongest storm ever to make landfall there and wreck potentially catastrophic damage.

Officials anticipate that 50,000 people will be displaced by the storm. But by Monday evening, only about 1,700 had evacuated to shelters, said Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s minister for local government. More were expected to arrive in the coming hours, he added. Few had arrived at shelters in St. Elizabeth Parish, about 75 miles west of the capital, Kingston, where the storm is expected to make landfall on Tuesday.

Officials have suggested that misinformation is turning some residents away from shelters, but also acknowledged there were some issues with the facilities, many of which are converted school buildings not designed to act as evacuation points. There have also been reports of residents arriving at shelters only to find them closed and having to wait for a manager to open them, Mr. McKenzie said at a news conference on Monday. These issues indicated that some aspects of the disaster preparedness needed strengthening, he said.

Jamaica faces challenges in preparing for the storm because of its limited resources and small size, disaster and emergency preparedness experts said. It is also difficult to forecast and prepare for a storm with such potentially sweeping impacts, they said.

“Jamaica is preparing for Hurricane Melissa to the best of its ability with the resources it has available,” Craig Fugate, who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Obama administration, said in an email. He added that, like many other island nations, Jamaica faces challenges with logistics and limited capacity.

“When an island nation gets threatened by a storm of this caliber, it is a very significant and unusual kind of problem, because in terms of evacuation, there’s a limit to where people who are evacuated can actually go,” said Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

He added that it was “extremely unlikely” that there would be enough space to safely accommodate affected residents, especially in low-income communities with buildings that are not resilient to storms. It is also difficult to make definitive predictions about landfall, or damage caused by rainfall, flooding and wind, Dr. Redlener said.

“They’re a low-income country, and they’re going to be low-resource for disaster response,” he added. “But no country is going to be fully prepared for this.”