The country's top officials have urged people on the island of 2.8 million to cooperate with evacuation orders, yet some are staying put, even as torrential rains and battering winds begin.
"Jamaicans on the whole aren't the type of people who would just get up and leave their home," said Jamal Peters, a 34-year-old front manager at a hotel in Port Royal.
"They'd prefer to stay. And if a window blows out or something like that they can be there."
Peters took up his post last month, and so far preparations at the 63-room waterfront hotel have involved moving guests to higher floors, battening down wherever possible, trimming trees and clearing out boats.
"We are still bracing for impact," he told AFP. "But for the most part, because this is not our first hurricane, Jamaicans would have been prepared for what's to come."
The monster top-level Category 5 storm was churning towards Jamaica with maximum 175-mile (280-kilometer) winds as of Monday evening and poised to dump several feet of rainfall that could cause deadly flooding.
Warnings that it could be worse than 1988's Hurricane Gilbert -- which left over 40 dead in Jamaica and killed hundreds more across the Caribbean and Mexico -- triggered fear in some residents.
But others said it was business as usual.
"Evacuate? No, no. We're not going to do that," Roy Brown, a plumber and tiler, said.
"Even if it's Category 6, I am not moving. I don't believe I can run from death. So whenever the Father is ready for me. I know he can take me, so I'm not running."
Brown told AFP that allegations of poor conditions at government-run shelters meant his views were widespread.
Jennifer Ramdial, a fisherwoman who said she has resided in the community for 30 years, cited the same reason for her defiance.
"I just don't want to leave," she added.
But Shelly-Ann McCalla, shelter manager at the Morant Bay Primary School, said people have been streaming into the location since Thursday, a day after Jamaica was placed under a tropical storm warning.
However, she said the occupancy level so far is less than the 86 who sought shelter at the location ahead of Hurricane Beryl last year.
"A lot of people don't want to come beacuse they say 'storm not coming,'" added said.
- 'Be with my family' -
Jamaica's own Usain Bolt, the Olympian sprinter, meanwhile was reposting government emergency information and disaster preparedness tips to his 4.6 million X followers.
The preparations weren't limited to human residents: zoos were also securing their animals, doing preparatory feeds and checks.
"Although we're staring down the loaded barrel of this nasty [Category 5], we will see you all on the other side," posted Joey Brown of Hope Zoo on Facebook.
Ishack Wilmot, 42, was sheltering with his family in Kingston, Jamaica's capital.
"Our family is pretty used to weathering out storms," he told AFP.
The surf camp hospitality manager and chef said preparations included packing away surfboards at work and collating important documents, along with stockpiling food and water.
"And then, you know, us as surfers -- as soon as we did our basic preparations, we all went surfing," he said.
But now, Wilmot said his normal ocean views had been grayed out by the incoming storm.
"We are currently experiencing a torrential downpour," he said Monday evening. "It's foggy out on the sea."
And ultimately, "if anything does happen and it does become like the worst-case scenario," he said, "I'd prefer to be with my family."
Slow but savage: Why hurricanes like Melissa are becoming more common
Washington (AFP) Oct 27, 2025 -
Fueled by abnormally warm Caribbean waters, Hurricane Melissa exploded into a Category 5 cyclone while moving at little more than a strolling pace -- a dangerous mix that could amplify its impacts through relentless rain, storm surge and wind.
Scientists say both rapid intensification and stalling storms are on the rise in a warming climate. Here's what to know.
- Supercharged by climate change -
Melissa jumped from a tropical storm with 70 mph (110 kph) winds on Saturday morning to a 140 mph Category 4 within 24 hours. It's since strengthened further into a Category 5, the highest level on the Saffir-Simpson, where even well-built structures face catastrophic damage.
It was the fourth of five Atlantic hurricanes this season to intensify in such dramatic fashion.
"We haven't had that many hurricanes in the Atlantic this season, but an unusual proportion of them went through a phase of intensifying quite rapidly," meteorologist and climate scientist Kerry Emanuel of MIT told AFP.
While it's hard to read the fingerprints of human-caused climate change into individual events, scientists are more confident when it comes to trends. "This may very well be collectively a signature of climate change," he said.
Warmer sea surface temperatures injects more energy into storms, giving them extra fuel. But the relationship is nuanced: it's actually the temperature difference between the water and the atmosphere that sets a hurricane's potential strength, a concept Emanuel pioneered.
"There's this atmospheric warming that tends to reduce the intensity, and there's sea surface temperature warming, which tends to increase the intensity," atmospheric scientist Daniel Gilford of nonprofit Climate Central told AFP. "Generally speaking...we find that the sea surface temperature wins out."
Melissa passed over waters made 1.4C (2.5F) warmer due to climate change, Climate Central's rapid analysis said -- temperatures that were at least 500 times more likely due to human-caused warming.
- 'A terrifying situation' -
Warmer oceans also mean wetter storms. "We expect something like between 25-50 percent extra rainfall in a storm like Melissa because of human-caused climate change," said Gilford.
Compounding matters further is the storm's slow crawl -- currently three miles per hour. Melissa is projected to dump 20-25 inches of rainfall to parts of Jamaica.
"It's this repetitive or continuous threat and existence in a dangerous situation," Jill Trepanier, a hurricane climatology expert at Louisiana State University, told AFP.
"It could be a prolonged surge. It could be high level rainfall over a longer period of time, and your watershed can't handle it. It could be extreme wind speed over an extended period of time, and most infrastructure can't handle that. It could be a combination of all three."
Trepanier authored a research paper last year on the subject of so-called stalling storms, finding that such events in the Caribbean typically happen in October, near coastlines.
Normally stalling storms tend to be dying out, as they pull up cold water from the depths of the ocean and are exposed to wavy, up-and-down winds in the atmosphere tearing them apart.
What makes Melissa unusual is that it stalled and intensified in the same spot -- a sign that the water was so warm, and the warmth ran so deep, it avoided the usual self-destructing effect.
"It's a bit of a terrifying situation," said Trepanier.
Former NOAA climatologist James Kossin, who has published several papers on the subject, said data clearly show that stalling storms are on the rise.
A possible driver is "Arctic amplification" -- global warming reduces the temperature difference from the planet's low to high latitudes, weakening the winds that normally steer storms "like a cork in stream." But more research is needed to confirm a causal link, he said.
Trepanier added that understanding the human and ecological dimensions is just as important as the physics because humans respond differently to risk.
With Jamaica's mountainous terrain, torrential rainfall could trigger landslides, while heavy damage to hotel infrastructure could batter the tourism-dependent economy for years, she warned.
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