A Year After Beryl, St Elizabeth’s South Coast Is Still Picking Up the Pieces

Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, 3 July 2025

One year on from Hurricane Beryl’s landfall on Jamaica’s south coast, residents of the fishing and farming communities of Treasure Beach, Parottee and the wider Black River corridor are still living with the consequences. Some have rebuilt. Many have not. Several remain without full electricity supply. And the recovery that was promised in the weeks after the storm, substantial in government announcement and modest in ground-level delivery, has left a residue of frustration that sits alongside genuine gratitude from those who did receive help.

In Parottee, the community that would bear the worst of what Melissa would bring fourteen months later, the hurricane anniversary finds families still in various states of partial recovery. Roofs replaced after Beryl with limited assistance were often the same roofs roped and bolted ahead of Melissa in October 2025. For those who had not yet completed repairs after Beryl, the 2025 storm season arrived before the recovery from the 2024 one was done. The compounding effect of back-to-back storms on housing stock, savings and community morale is a lived reality that aggregate statistics do not adequately capture.

The Cost of Slow Recovery

The government’s Rebuild Jamaica initiative distributed over $1.5 billion in direct support to Beryl-affected families by March 2025. Cheques ranging from $50,000 to $400,000 were allocated on the basis of needs assessments. For a family whose home sustained major damage, a $400,000 grant is a meaningful contribution. It is not sufficient to rebuild a home. The gap between government assistance and the actual cost of reconstruction leaves many families using their own resources, borrowed money or community support to cover the difference, and those with the fewest resources are the ones who fall furthest behind.

The fishing community around Black River and Treasure Beach faced a particular compounding of losses. Storm damage to boats, fish traps and coastal infrastructure reduced incomes precisely when rebuilding costs were highest. One fisherman who lost all his fish traps in Beryl and rebuilt them independently, receiving only $150,000 in government assistance seven months after the storm, had to contend with the threat of Melissa’s arrival before he had fully rebuilt his livelihood. The cycle of storm, incomplete recovery and renewed storm exposure is not a natural disaster pattern. It is a structural one, shaped by inadequate housing quality, insufficient disaster financing and the systemic underfunding of resilience in Jamaica’s most storm-exposed communities.

A Year of Warning Signals

The first anniversary of Beryl was also a moment when residents of the south coast were already tracking the 2025 hurricane season with heightened anxiety. Those who had been through Beryl had a new relationship with storm forecasting, a greater willingness to take warnings seriously, and a sharper awareness of their own vulnerability. The resilience of community in Treasure Beach, noted by observers across the recovery period, was real. So was the exhaustion.

For Jamaica’s property and housing sector, the Beryl anniversary pointed to a structural problem that the country had not yet confronted honestly: the housing stock in the most storm-exposed parishes is not built to survive the storms that are now a foreseeable feature of the climate, and the recovery financing available after those storms do not allow families to rebuild to a better standard than what was there before. The result is a cycle of recurring loss that gradually erodes the wealth, security and confidence of coastal communities. Melissa, when it came, would break that cycle by making the problem too large to absorb incrementally. It forced a reckoning that a decade of incremental storms had not.

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomes Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com