Authorities in Jamaica are struggling this Sunday to shelter as many residents as possible from the "catastrophic floods" that meteorologists have predicted will occur in the Caribbean country due to the passage of Hurricane Melissa this week.
According to several local media outlets, residents of some areas of Jamaica, especially Port Royal, on the coast of the capital of Kingston, in the southeast of the country and one of the most prone to flooding, have ignored the authorities' warnings to seek shelter.
To transport residents to the 881 shelters across the country, the Government provided the Jamaica Urban Transit Company.
Around noon on Sunday, Margaret Parkes, 62, was one of the few Jamaicans who agreed to take the bus and be transported to one of the shelters.
Parkes told local media that she decided to move because she suffers from panic attacks.
According to the most recent bulletin from the National Hurricane Center at 3:00 p.m. (7:00 p.m. GMT), Melissa was packing sustained winds of 220 km/h.
Meanwhile, Transport Minister Daryl Vaz said the agency had only received four calls from residents seeking shelter since Saturday.
Vaz said that less than a dozen residents of areas such as Flagaman on the coast of Saint Elizabeth, as well as Old Harbour Bay in Saint Catherine, and Port Royal and Rae Town, both in Kingston, had been moved to shelters.
In Port Royal and Portmore in the southeast of the country, waves of up to 4 meters are expected, said Jamaica's senior meteorologist, Evan Thompson.
For his part, Jamaica's Minister of Local Government, Desmond McKenzie, urged residents of flood-prone or low-lying areas to take shelter immediately, warning that many communities will be covered in water and will not survive the flooding.
“It will be impossible for us, after so many warnings we have given, for our first responders to go out and risk their lives,” McKenzie said.
On the other hand, the president of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, called this Sunday to move towards"normality" after several days with a large part of his provinces at red alert levels, in which the work day was suspended due to Hurricane Melissa.
“ The country, for the most part, must now begin to normalize all its activities ,” said Abinader, who decided to lift the suspension of work and education in most provinces, including the capital.
"The forecasts were very negative, and that's why we took every measure to mitigate any damage," he said this afternoon in a joint press conference with Gloria Ceballos, director of the Dominican Institute of Meteorology (Indomet), and Juan Manuel Méndez, director of the Emergency Operations Center (COE).
In fact, the COE decided this Sunday to lower the number of provinces on red alert to four, which are located in the southwest of the country, while another thirteen are on yellow alert and the same number are on green alert.
To date, in the Dominican Republic, Melissa has caused one death and flooding, and authorities continue to search in the waters of the Caribbean Sea for a child who disappeared near the Santo Domingo seawall.
As a preliminary figure, the COE director indicated that there are"735 homes affected, 3,765 displaced people, four shelters activated, with 77 people housed, and 48 communities cut off."
Abinader praised the work of the Civil Defense, which"helped prevent and rescue families from vulnerable areas."
