DEREK ACHONG

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

Ja­maican cit­i­zens and of­fi­cials are brac­ing for what may be the strongest hur­ri­cane they have faced in decades.

With Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa in­ten­si­fy­ing in­to a Cat­e­go­ry 4 storm yes­ter­day af­ter­noon and ex­pect­ed to make land­fall late this evening or ear­ly Tues­day morn­ing, last-minute prepa­ra­tions kicked in­to high gear across the is­land yes­ter­day.

In a press re­lease yes­ter­day evening, Ja­maica’s Na­tion­al Wa­ter Com­mis­sion (NWC) said that most of its ma­jor wa­ter sup­ply sys­tems were still op­er­a­tional de­spite the is­land al­ready ex­pe­ri­enc­ing heavy rain­fall from the de­vel­op­ing weath­er sys­tem.

Speak­ing at a joint press con­fer­ence, Wa­ter, En­vi­ron­ment, and Cli­mate Change Min­is­ter Matthew Samu­da said that the swift restora­tion of the wa­ter sup­ply af­ter the hur­ri­cane would be crit­i­cal.

“Wa­ter is life, and I do want to as­sure all the NWC cus­tomers of rur­al wa­ter sys­tems usu­al­ly run by mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties, that we are mon­i­tor­ing very care­ful­ly the sit­u­a­tion that will af­fect them,” Samu­da said.

De­spite as­sur­ances from elec­tric­i­ty and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions providers over their pre­pared­ness for the pas­sage of the hur­ri­cane and its af­ter­math, the coun­try’s Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, Sci­ence, Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, and Trans­port Daryl Vaz still warned cit­i­zens to be re­al­is­tic with their ex­pec­ta­tions af­ter it took weeks to re­store ser­vice to some cus­tomers in re­mote parish­es af­ter the coun­try was brushed by Hur­ri­cane Beryl in Ju­ly, last year.

Vaz said: “I want to cau­tion Ja­maica to re­alise and un­der­stand that we did not get a di­rect hit from Beryl and we are due to get a di­rect hit (at) cat­e­go­ry 4 and pos­si­bly cat­e­go­ry 5, so the lev­el of dam­age that you saw in Beryl will like­ly be se­vere­ly in­creased and more wide­spread than what we had.”

“I am sat­is­fied that we have a plan in place. But again, I want to cau­tion that the plan is one thing, the ex­e­cu­tion of that plan is what is go­ing to make the dif­fer­ence in our re­cov­ery,” he added.

In a state­ment is­sued late yes­ter­day, MBJ Air­ports Lim­it­ed, which op­er­ates the Sang­ster In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in Mon­tego Bay, an­nounced that the fa­cil­i­ty’s op­er­a­tions were tem­porar­i­ly sus­pend­ed in prepa­ra­tion for the hur­ri­cane. The coun­try’s oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al air­port, the Nor­man Man­ley In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in Kingston, was al­so tem­porar­i­ly closed.

The air­ports are ex­pect­ed to re­open af­ter air­port au­thor­i­ties con­duct an as­sess­ment fol­low­ing the pas­sage of the hur­ri­cane.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, over 6000 shel­ters across Ja­maica were ac­ti­vat­ed and housed over 300 cit­i­zens as of yes­ter­day evening.

Al­though pro­vi­sions were made to evac­u­ate res­i­dents of low-ly­ing coastal ar­eas, who will be af­fect­ed by sig­nif­i­cant storm surges as­so­ci­at­ed with the hur­ri­cane, Vaz stat­ed that the ser­vice was un­der­utilised.

“There has al­ways been a hes­i­tan­cy when evac­u­a­tion or­ders are giv­en. Do not take this one light­ly. This may be the one,” he said, as he plead­ed with cit­i­zens to heed warn­ings from au­thor­i­ties over po­ten­tial dan­ger.