Kingston buzzed with feverish preparations and anxious alerts in the days before Melissa, a powerful Category 5 hurricane, made landfall earlier this week on the island of Jamaica. Supermarkets and hardware stores endured the crush of customers scrambling to stockpile water, food, and other supplies while residents boarded up windows and cut away vulnerable branches from hulking mango trees.

Even for a Caribbean capital city that is no stranger to the perennial threat of hurricanes, the alarming forecasts about Melissa's steady approach and certain intensification put communities across the city on edge. Throughout the island, which has had its share of impacts from deadly tropical weather, including Hurricane Beryl just last year, there was a palpable feeling that Melissa might be a different kind of storm.

"All we can do is try to be prepared," said Kevin, a local handyman who lives in Portmore, an urban center on Kingston's outskirts. "We can only do so much to get ready for it. The rest is in God's hands."

Melissa made weather history as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to ever make landfall. As it moved into Jamaica's southwestern coast, the storm's 185-mph sustained winds and sub-900 barometric pressure left meteorologists in awe and Jamaicans under the dark howling shadow of a monster churning over their heads. Yet, as horrifying as Melissa's fury was this week, its destructive strength follows a pattern that has become all too unsurprising on a planet subjected to entirely preventable climate chaos.

"This is actually a complete catastrophe, and it’s really quite terrifying," Jamaican-British climate activist Mikaela Loach told Democracy Now! "And it also makes me quite angry that it doesn’t have to be this way. This has been caused by the climate crisis, by fossil fuel companies. I think it’s important that we’re not just devastated and sad about this, but also that we are angry and direct that anger towards the people who are responsible."

While Hurricane Melissa may be called a natural disaster, the conditions that make super storms like Melissa possible are anything but natural. As Loach and just about every climate scientist on Earth point out, the unprecedented warmth of ocean waters act like fuel for tropical cyclones, supercharging them to the point that Melissa was able to double its wind speeds in under 24 hours. Such rapid hurricane intensification is almost unheard of and is the result of unnaturally warm seawater that extends deep below the surface – water temperatures that are themselves directly linked to the fossil fuel industry and an economic system built around its carbon emissions.

That system, rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits, also requires grotesque levels of inequality, which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.

It was, of course, the wealthiest of communities that enjoyed the means and resources to prepare and weather the storm. From the gated communities of New Kingston where residents quickly summoned workers to close their built-in storm shutters and fuel up generator tanks to the high-end hotels and office buildings outfitted with hurricane-proof glass, there stood one end of Jamaican society girding for Melissa's wrath. On the other end, representing a much larger portion of the Jamaican people, were the poor and working-class communities with far fewer means to prepare for the tempest. From Kingston and beyond, this included thousands of Jamaicans living in ramshackle housing, with corrugated tin roofs that turned into propeller blades thrown into the air by 130-mph wind gusts. It included the fishing villages of Port Royal and other coastal areas, scrambling to shore up boats and flee inland away from the devastating storm surge. It included the shanty neighborhoods on the edge of waterways and canals, prone to severe flooding, as well as hillside hamlets perched along the steep slopes of Jamaica's Blue Mountains that were swept away by dangerous landslides. Then there are the many rural areas that are likely to remain without power and communications for many weeks, along with the farming communities whose crops have been wiped out by the storm.

All of these people........

© Common Dreams