KINGSTON - More than 25,000 peo­ple were packed in­to shel­ters yes­ter­day af­ter the storm ripped roofs off their homes and left them tem­porar­i­ly home­less. Dixon said 77% of the is­land was with­out pow­er.

The out­ages com­pli­cat­ed as­sess­ing the dam­age be­cause of “a to­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion black­out” in ar­eas, Richard Thomp­son, act­ing di­rec­tor gen­er­al of Ja­maica’s Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Emer­gency Man­age­ment, told the Na­tion­wide News Net­work ra­dio sta­tion. “Re­cov­ery will take time, but the gov­ern­ment is ful­ly mo­bilised,” Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness said in a state­ment.

“Re­lief sup­plies are be­ing pre­pared, and we are do­ing every­thing pos­si­ble to re­store nor­mal­cy quick­ly.”

Of­fi­cials in Black Riv­er, Ja­maica, a south­west­ern coastal town of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 peo­ple, plead­ed for aid at a news con­fer­ence.

“Cat­a­stroph­ic is a mild term based on what we are ob­serv­ing,” May­or Richard Solomon said.

Solomon said the lo­cal res­cue in­fra­struc­ture had been de­mol­ished by the storm. The hos­pi­tal, po­lice units and emer­gency ser­vices were in­un­dat­ed by floods and un­able to con­duct emer­gency op­er­a­tions.

Ja­maican Trans­porta­tion Min­is­ter Daryl Vaz said two of the is­land’s air­ports will re­open to­day to re­lief flights on­ly, with UN agen­cies and dozens of non-prof­its on stand­by to dis­trib­ute ba­sic goods.

“The dev­as­ta­tion is enor­mous,” he said.

“We need all hands on deck to re­cov­er stronger and to help those in need at this time.”

The Unit­ed States is send­ing res­cue and re­sponse teams to as­sist in re­cov­ery ef­forts in the Caribbean, Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio an­nounced on X.

St Eliz­a­beth Po­lice Su­per­in­ten­dent Co­leridge Minto told Na­tion­wide News Net­work yes­ter­day that au­thor­i­ties have found at least four bod­ies in south­west Ja­maica. One death was re­port­ed in the west when a tree fell on a ba­by, state min­is­ter Ab­ka Fitz-Hen­ley told Na­tion­wide News Net­work.

Be­fore land­fall, Melis­sa had al­ready been blamed for three deaths in Ja­maica, three in Haiti and one in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic. (AP)