Category 5 Hurricane Melissa rears up for record-setting strike on Jamaica

Alex Harris, Miami Herald on Oct 27, 2025

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Hurricane Melissa — now a deadly Category 5 storm — is winding up to strike Jamaica with what could be the strongest winds ever recorded on the Caribbean island.

As of 8 a.m. Monday morning, the National Hurricane Center found the hurricane had maximum sustained winds of 160 mph. And it forecasts the storm to strengthen even more over the record-warm waters of the Caribbean before it makes landfall in Jamaica, with winds potentially reaching 165 mph.

While Jamaica has been battered by hurricanes for centuries, it has never seen direct landfall of a Category 4 hurricane, much less a Category 5, said Evan Thompson, the chief meteorologist of Meteorological Service of Jamaica.

“We have not had this experience before, so it’s important for us to consider this as an extraordinary situation,” Thompson told the Jamaica Gleaner.

Portions of the island have already been doused with more than a foot of rain during Melissa’s approach, and forecasters said up to 30 more inches could be on the way. That’s on top of storm surge, which is expected to reach 9 to 13 feet above land, particularly on Jamaica’s southeast coast.

The damage from Melissa’s strong winds and deep pockets of flooding rain will be worsened by the storm’s incredibly slow speed. On Monday morning, the monster storm was crawling forward at only 3 mph.

Forecasters said that sets Jamaica up to be battered for days — far beyond the daylong impacts of the storm’s eye. It’s similar to what Cat 5 Dorian did in 2019 to the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas, which left bulldozed after the hurricane parked over the islands.

“A painstakingly slow turn toward the northwest and north is expected during the next 24 hours, and Melissa is forecast to make landfall on the south coast of Jamaica Tuesday morning and emerge off the north coast by Tuesday afternoon,” the hurricane center wrote in the 5 a.m. Monday update.

The Caribbean is blanketed in storm watches and warnings, including hurricane warnings for all of Jamaica and the Cuban provinces of Granma, Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo, and Holguin.

Turks and Caicos, as well as the Southeastern Bahamas, are under a hurricane watch. And Haiti and the Cuban province of Las Tunas remain under a tropical storm warning.

Days of rain have already claimed multiple lives in the Caribbean. In Haiti, officials have counted three deaths, 16 injured people, 450 flooded homes and 10 damaged homes, mostly to the southwest. Several bridges are down and hundreds of people remain in shelters across the nation, according to the Sunday update from the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.