Storm-Weary: St Elizabeth Was Still Rebuilding From Beryl When Melissa Arrived

St Elizabeth, Jamaica, 26 October 2025

As Tropical Storm Melissa tracked toward Jamaica’s south coast in the final days of October 2025, the communities of St Elizabeth were preparing for a storm they could not fully afford to face. More than a year after Hurricane Beryl devastated the parish in July 2024, thousands of families were still living in homes that had been only partially repaired, waiting for assistance that had been promised but not fully delivered, and absorbing the accumulated financial cost of a recovery that had moved more slowly than the storm season that was once again bearing down on them.

In Parottee, one of the coastal communities that Beryl had struck hardest and that Melissa would subsequently erase, families were roping their roofs to the ground. Cement blocks served as anchors for the ropes stretched across zinc sheeting. Children helped parents secure windows. But many of the homes being prepared were the same structures that had been damaged in 2024, patched with the modest assistance the government had provided, and not yet rebuilt to any standard that a Category 5 storm could be expected to respect.

Recovery That Never Fully Came

The scale of the unfinished recovery from Beryl across St Elizabeth was visible in the landscape and audible in the voices of residents. Farmers who had lost crops and equipment in 2024 had rebuilt what they could from their own resources. Fishermen who had lost boats and gear had borrowed to replace them. Families who had lost roofs had taken whatever assistance was available and done the rest themselves. The government’s $1.5 billion in Beryl relief, distributed over many months, had reached many households but had not been sufficient to lift the parish’s housing stock to a meaningfully more resilient baseline.

The mayor of Black River, Richard Solomon, acknowledged in March 2025 that the scale of need in St Elizabeth following Beryl had been daunting and that many communities continued to struggle. The parish had been designated Jamaica’s breadbasket for its agricultural output, but the term increasingly felt ironic to those watching its farming and fishing communities absorb storm after storm without the resources to rebuild properly between them.

Two Storms, One Pattern

The juxtaposition of Beryl and Melissa, a Category 4 storm followed fourteen months later by a Category 5, is not a coincidence of history. It is a preview of the climate future that Jamaica’s coastal parishes face. The Atlantic hurricane season is producing stronger storms more frequently, and the windows between major events are shortening. A parish that was already struggling to complete its recovery from one storm when the next one arrived is a parish whose housing and community resilience strategy is structurally inadequate for the conditions it now faces.

The question that Melissa would force Jamaica to confront, loudly and immediately, was one that the Beryl recovery had quietly been raising for over a year: what does it mean to rebuild in a place that will be hit again, and how should housing, land use and community investment be configured when the certainty of future storms is built into the long-term risk calculus? St Elizabeth’s families, who had lived through both storms and were about to live through the consequences of the second and far worse one, deserved a clearer answer than the country had yet been willing to give them.