Jamaica’s Grid Was Not Ready for Hurricane Melissa

Officials don’t yet know the full extent of the storm’s damage and it could take days, maybe weeks, to conduct a comprehensive damage survey from the strongest known storm to hit Jamaica. According to early reports, there were .

“The reports that are coming in are catastrophic,” , Jamaica’s Minister of Transport, Telecommunications and Energy, told Sky News Australia in a . “Not very much survives a Category 5 hurricane in terms of infrastructure.”

, the local utility, did not respond to a request for comment.

The situation in the island underscores the challenges for vulnerable countries to keep up with the quickening pace of climate change. A UN Environmental Programme report released on Wednesday found that . The agency says poor nations will need between $310 billion to $365 billion in adaptation finance per year by 2035.

After Beryl struck the island as a Category 4 storm, JPS vowed to earmark $108 million in 2025 towards investments aimed “to reduce power disruptions, safeguard infrastructure integrity, and improve our system’s ability to withstand extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tropical storms,” according to its , published in April.

It’s unclear how much of this money had already been spent by the time Melissa hit Jamaica. But according to Sofia Sandano, a country transition analyst at BloombergNEF, the country’s electricity grid is still highly vulnerable to extreme weather despite early efforts to shore it up.

The 2024 hurricane season “reinforced a hard truth: climate change is no longer a distant concern鈥攊t is a present and persistent threat,” the company’s chairman Damian Obiglio wrote in the annual report.

As of June, though, the nation’s power system was “built to withstand up to Category 3” hurricane conditions, according to a published online by JPS. Category 3 storms have maximum wind speeds of up to 129 miles per hour (208 kilometers per hour).