The death toll in Jamaica from Hurricane Melissa rose to 28 on Saturday, even as the authorities and humanitarian workers acknowledged that they had yet to reach dozens of communities that were hardest hit by the devastating storm.
The Jamaican government said on Saturday night that nine more deaths had been identified since the previous tally of 19. Additional reports of possible fatalities are still being verified, a government statement said.
Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday as a Category 5 storm, one of the worst in the country’s history. At least another 30 people were killed in Haiti, which was not directly hit by the storm but experienced severe flooding.
Many communities that were affected by the storm, especially in western Jamaica, have been cut off from the rest of the country by washed-out roads and downed trees. A vast majority of Jamaicans are still without electricity and telephone service, so authorities have no real idea how many people died in many areas of the country, several people involved in rescue operations said.
In St Elizabeth Parish, in the southwest of the island, fire superintendent Kimar Brooks said the authorities had not reached about 15 of the parish’s roughly three dozen communities. Blockages have cut some towns off, Coleridge Minto, the police superintendent of St Elizabeth, said on Saturday. At least seven deaths have been officially reported in the parish, he said.
Esther Pinnock, a spokesperson for the Jamaica Red Cross, said there were isolated communities in five other parishes that sustained significant damages.
“There are a significant number of communities that have not been reached,” she said, noting that some of them had small pockets of people. “We don’t know the true picture of what is happening in the western parishes.”
Pinnock said that it was only on Saturday — four days after Hurricane Melissa made landfall — that the Red Cross began hearing from its branch members in western parts of the country.
‘There is a strong possibility that more dead bodies will emerge,” she said, “and as a result of that, a heightened death toll.”
New York Times News Service