Hurricane Melissa: Caribbean Nations Urged to Intensify Hurricane Preparedness as Peak Season Looms

• 2025 Atlantic season already above-normal with 12 named storms
• Late-season peak danger persists well into October and November
• Rapid intensification in warm Caribbean waters alarming climate scientists
• Jamaica’s housing stock critically exposed to any major hurricane strike
• ODPEM urges all households to finalise emergency preparedness plans now
• Insurance gaps leave tens of thousands of Jamaican homeowners financially vulnerable

KINGSTON, Jamaica — The Atlantic basin has produced twelve named storms in nine weeks. The Caribbean Sea is running several degrees above its long-term seasonal average. And the climate scientists who study rapid intensification — the phenomenon by which a tropical system can explode from a Category 1 nuisance to a Category 4 catastrophe within 24 hours — are watching the warm, deep waters south of Jamaica with a particular unease.

Peak hurricane season, measured statistically at its zenith on September 10, has not finished with the Caribbean. History, meteorology, and an unusually charged 2025 Atlantic season are all conspiring to deliver the same message to governments, homeowners, and families across the region: the window of maximum danger has not closed.

“We are absolutely still in the heart of an active and potentially record-breaking season,” said Dr. Phil Klotzbach, senior research scientist at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science, whose seasonal forecast team issued a dramatically above-normal outlook for 2025 as early as April. “The fuel in the Caribbean — sea-surface temperatures, low wind shear, abundant atmospheric moisture — remains in place. October storms are not rare. October major hurricanes are not rare.”

A Season Already Written in the Record Books

By the time most Jamaicans returned to work after the long weekend, the National Hurricane Center in Miami had already logged twelve named storms for 2025, surpassing the historical average of roughly fourteen named storms for an entire season with weeks still remaining. NOAA’s May 2025 seasonal outlook called for seventeen to twenty-five named storms, eight to thirteen hurricanes, and four to seven major hurricanes — numbers that placed the forecast squarely in the upper tier of recorded seasons.

The drivers behind that forecast have not abated. La Niña conditions, which suppress the upper-level wind shear that historically tears tropical systems apart, have persisted across the Pacific. Atlantic sea-surface temperatures from the Gulf of Mexico to the waters north of Venezuela remain anomalously warm — in some areas more than 1.5°C above the 1991-2020 average baseline.

“What concerns us most heading into October is not the number of storms,” said a senior meteorologist at the Jamaica Meteorological Service, speaking from the agency’s Kingston offices. “It is the potential intensity of any storm that does form. The thermodynamic environment is as primed as anything we have observed in recent years.”

October’s Brutal Precedents

For Jamaicans tempted to breathe easier as September draws to a close, history offers a sobering corrective.

Hurricane Ivan, which struck Jamaica on September 11, 2004 as a Category 4 storm, killed seventeen people on the island, destroyed more than 18,000 homes, and caused damage estimated at $1.4 billion. Ivan made landfall in September — but the 2004 Atlantic season’s damage continued with Hurricane Jeanne striking Haiti in late September and Hurricane Karl persisting into October.

More telling is Hurricane Gilbert of September 1988, still etched into Jamaican national memory as the benchmark catastrophe. Gilbert struck Jamaica on September 12 with sustained winds of 175 mph, destroying an estimated 80,000 homes and leaving half the island homeless. The storm’s central pressure of 888 millibars made it, at the time, the most intense Atlantic hurricane on record.

What both storms illustrate is a pattern that climate scientists say is only becoming more pronounced: storms forming in the deep tropics, moving westward across abnormally warm water, and intensifying at rates that compress the warning window available to governments and citizens to dangerous brevity.

“Rapid intensification events — defined as a 35-mph or greater increase in sustained winds within 24 hours — have become significantly more common in the Caribbean basin over the past two decades,” noted a World Meteorological Organization analysis published earlier this year. “This is directly consistent with projections from climate models linking warming sea-surface temperatures to more frequent and more extreme intensification episodes.”

What a Major Hurricane Would Mean for Jamaica’s Housing Stock

For a property market already navigating affordability pressures and an acute shortage of formal housing, the prospect of a direct major hurricane strike is not merely a human tragedy in waiting — it is a potential economic catastrophe measured in the tens of billions of dollars.

Jamaica’s housing stock carries structural vulnerabilities that have been documented for decades and remain only partially addressed. A significant proportion of the island’s residential building inventory — particularly in rural parishes and informal urban settlements — was constructed without formal engineering oversight, using materials and methods that predate current building codes. In western and central parishes, where topography amplifies storm surge and wind exposure, the proportion of structurally at-risk homes rises sharply.

The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) has previously estimated that tens of thousands of Jamaican homes are “extremely vulnerable” to Category 3 or above conditions — defined as sustained winds exceeding 111 mph.

“We are talking about a scenario where a major hurricane making landfall in western Jamaica could damage or destroy upwards of 100,000 structures,” said Richard Thompson, Director-General of ODPEM, in an interview with The Gleaner earlier this month. “That is not a worst-case fringe scenario. That is what the vulnerability assessments tell us is within the range of what we could experience.”

The insurance picture compounds the exposure. Despite years of advocacy by insurers and government alike, independent estimates suggest that fewer than one in three Jamaican homeowners — and a far smaller proportion of renters — carries meaningful property insurance against hurricane damage. Among lower-income households and those in informal settlements, the gap is wider still.

“An uninsured household that loses its home to a hurricane does not simply repair and rebuild,” said a housing policy analyst at a Kingston-based think tank. “It enters a multi-year process of dependency on government assistance, remittances, and informal reconstruction that can take a decade. That is the real cost of the insurance gap — it is measured in generational setbacks, not just dollars.”

The Jamaica Observer has reported extensively this year on construction quality concerns, particularly the persistence of substandard roofing materials — corrugated zinc sheeting over lightweight timber frames — in communities throughout St. James, Westmoreland, Hanover, and St. Elizabeth. In a Category 4 or 5 event, such structures offer negligible resistance.

ODPEM’s Preparedness Push: Where Things Stand

Against this backdrop, ODPEM has intensified its public preparedness campaign in recent weeks, coordinating with parish disaster committees, the Jamaica Fire Brigade, and community-level wardens to accelerate shelter registration and household readiness assessments.

As of mid-September, approximately 800 designated shelters across the island had been assessed and classified under ODPEM’s tiered system, with Category 5-rated shelters concentrated in the most exposed western and northern parishes. The agency has urged all households to maintain a minimum 72-hour emergency kit — food, water, medications, important documents — and to know their nearest designated shelter in advance of any storm warning.

“Preparedness is not what you do when the warning flag goes up,” Thompson told JIS News. “Preparedness is what you have already done, weeks and months before the storm forms. By the time we are issuing watches and warnings, the window for preparation is essentially closed.”

The Jamaica Meteorological Service, meanwhile, is participating in a Caribbean-wide enhanced monitoring protocol that increases radiosonde balloon launches and coordination with NOAA reconnaissance aircraft during the active season period. The agency is also working with CARICOM partners through the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) to share real-time data across national meteorological services — a coordination mechanism that was credited with improving regional response times during recent seasons.

The Rapid Intensification Threat: Science’s Most Urgent Warning

Perhaps no single meteorological development has attracted more concern from atmospheric scientists this decade than the increasing frequency and severity of rapid intensification events in the Caribbean.

A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Climate Change earlier in 2025 found that the probability of a tropical storm reaching Category 4 or 5 intensity within 48 hours of entering the Caribbean Sea has increased by approximately 25 percent compared to the 1980-2000 baseline period. The mechanism is straightforward: warmer, deeper pools of warm water provide an energy source that intensifying storms can exploit rapidly, and the current Caribbean conditions represent precisely such an environment.

“The concern from a preparedness standpoint is not the storm you can see coming for a week,” said Dr. Klotzbach. “The concern is the storm that is a Category 2 when it passes Puerto Rico on a Tuesday and a Category 5 when it is 200 miles from Jamaica on a Wednesday. That is a realistic scenario this season.”

The BBC and Reuters have both reported on the phenomenon in recent weeks, noting that the 2023 and 2024 seasons produced multiple rapid intensification events that challenged emergency management systems across the Caribbean and Gulf Coast.

What Jamaican Homeowners Should Do Now

For the island’s property owners — whether holding formal title or occupying land informally — the convergence of an active season and structural housing vulnerability creates a specific and urgent set of responsibilities.

ODPEM’s hurricane preparedness checklist, available on the agency’s website, recommends that homeowners inspect and if necessary reinforce roof fastening systems before storm season’s end, clear drainage systems and gutters, secure loose materials that could become projectiles, and identify structural weaknesses in walls and windows. For those in flood-prone areas — including significant portions of the Kingston waterfront, the Pedro Plains in St. Elizabeth, and low-lying communities throughout Westmoreland — the agency recommends knowing flood evacuation routes and not relying solely on media alerts for warning.

Insurance professionals contacted by this publication this week urged uninsured homeowners to seek even partial coverage before the season concludes at the end of November — noting that many policies have a waiting period after purchase before hurricane coverage activates.

“The time to buy insurance is not when a storm is in the Gulf,” said one Kingston-based insurance broker. “At that point, carriers have already stopped writing new policies. The window we have right now, in late September, is genuinely the last comfortable moment to act.”

A Region on Alert

Across the wider Caribbean, governments are tracking the Atlantic with heightened attention. In Cuba, civil defense authorities have maintained elevated readiness protocols since early August. In Haiti, where infrastructure remains severely compromised following years of political instability and the 2021 earthquake, humanitarian organisations including World Vision, the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme have pre-positioned emergency supplies in anticipation of a potential major storm event. In the Dominican Republic, the National Emergency Management Commission (COE) has conducted monthly simulation exercises.

For Jamaica, the calculus is straightforward and the time is now. The season has not peaked in terms of its remaining destructive potential. The island’s housing stock carries documented vulnerabilities. The insurance safety net has known and significant gaps. And the atmosphere over the Caribbean Sea is holding more energy than at almost any comparable point in the historical record.

“We have been fortunate so far this season,” said Thompson. “But fortune is not a preparedness strategy. The next named storm is already out there, waiting to form. We do not know where. We do not know when. But we know the conditions are right. And we know that Jamaica has to be ready.”

The next name on the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season list is Melissa.

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