Overview
- Hurricane Melissa made landfall near Chivirico in Santiago de Cuba around 3:10 a.m. local time as a Category 3 with 120 mph winds, with forecasters warning of life‑threatening storm surge, flash flooding and landslides.
- Jamaica was declared a disaster area after Melissa’s Category 5 landfall near New Hope with 185 mph winds, leaving widespread power and communications outages, flooding in multiple parishes and damage to several hospitals, including hard‑hit St. Elizabeth.
- Cuban authorities report about 735,000 people evacuated in eastern provinces under hurricane warnings, while the Bahamas ordered relocations in southern islands ahead of the storm’s arrival.
- At least seven deaths have been reported across the Caribbean—three in Jamaica, three in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic—as full assessments are slowed by blocked roads and outages.
- Forecasts call for Melissa to cross eastern Cuba today, reach the southeastern and central Bahamas later today and pass near Bermuda Thursday night, with 10–20 inches of rain possible in eastern Cuba, 5–10 inches in the southeastern Bahamas and storm surge up to 8–12 feet in Cuba and 5–8 feet in the Bahamas.