Shellshocked and homeless, Hurricane Melissa survivors wait for aid to arrive

“I thought I wasn’t gonna survive,” Miller, 33, said. “Things were blowing inside, the roof was blowing off, about a dozen trees fell on my home.”

By the time emergency responders arrived, Miller’s home was half-submerged. His roof, appliances and personal belongings, including his bed, had been lost to Hurricane Melissa’s 185mph winds. “It was chaos. The place is decimated right now,” he said.

The category 5 storm left a trail of destruction as it barrelled through the Caribbean last week, devastating parts of Haiti and causing severe flooding and power outages in eastern Cuba and the Bahamas before hitting Bermuda. At least 19 people have been confirmed killed in Jamaica and a further 30 in Haiti, although, as communication networks remain crippled across the region, the true scale of the impact is unknown.

Sofran McKenzie, from Clarendon, Jamaica, survived by sheltering in an abandoned building with her partner and six-year-old daughter. Now they are homeless.

“I am sleeping on a wet mattress with floodwater around me. I have nowhere to go, no one to help,” she said. “We thought surviving the hurricane was the hard bit but life afterwards is even worse. I’m so numb I can’t even cry.”

The UK initially said it would provide £2.5m in aid to help the Caribbean region recover from the disaster, but later pledged an extra £5m in emergency humanitarian funding.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has chartered flights to evacuate British nationals and members of the Windrush generation with indefinite leave to remain who were in Jamaica at the time.

Diane Abbott, the independent MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said: “It is not clear that the British government's response has matched the severity of the crisis in Jamaica.” The FCDO was approached for comment.

Jamaica’s opposition leader, Mark Golding, requested further commitments to help the island rebuild: “There is a moral obligation to support the development of countries like Jamaica, countries that were part of the colonial system which Europe had imposed on the world and used to build their own economies and create the tremendous wealth they now enjoy,” he said.

In the UK, British-Jamaican communities are focused on raising relief funds and pushing the government to increase its £7.5m regional pledge and commit to long-term climate-justice reparations.

Lee Jasper, a community organiser and former policing director for London, said: “Each time a storm threatens Jamaica, my heart fractures in three directions. The TV shows the clouds rolling in; the WhatsApp chats fall silent as power fails. We wait for a message, a photograph, a single word: alive … The waiting is over. The wind has passed. The rain remains. And out of that rain must come something new, not just resilience but justice.”

Photograph by Ricardo Makyn/AFP via Getty Images