Before losing connection amid extremely damaged infrastructure, storm chaser Brandon Clement spoke with AccuWeather on Oct. 30 from the site of Hurricane Melissa's devastating landfall in Jamaica.

New Hope

Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica as a Category 5 storm, causing widespread destruction, particularly in the New Hope and Black River areas. According to storm chaser Brandon Clement, every home in the landfall zone is damaged or destroyed, with hospitals, power, and communications infrastructure severely impacted.

Residents are facing a shortage of essential supplies such as food, water, and fuel, and aid workers are only now able to access some affected areas due to blocked roads. Communication issues persist, making coordination of relief efforts challenging as the region begins to recover from the disaster.

Complete collapse at the point of Melissa's landfall in Jamaica

We're continuing to see the widespread destruction left behind in the Caribbean, including Jamaica, where Melissa hit as a Category 5 hurricane on Tuesday. For the latest, we're joined now by storm chaser Brandon Clement on the phone, live from New Hope, Jamaica. And Brandon, we talked to you yesterday. You said that you, along with rescue and aid workers, were struggling to get to that landfall point, and you've made it a significant way now. Yeah, we've made it all the way down to where the hurricane made landfall. Black River is just to the east of where the landfall happened. Of course, they got an eastern eyewall, which is the worst part of the hurricane, and they're in some really bad shape there. A lot of desperation going on at the moment. Give us more of a description. What are you seeing on the ground, and what are you hearing from the locals? You know, they have nothing. Every home there is damaged. Most of them are destroyed. The hospital's damaged. There's no power, there's no communications, there's no supplies like food or water, no electricity, no gas. So it's basically a complete collapse of infrastructure. And when you get in that position, this is now basically day three, three and a half almost, since you started seeing hurricane condition. On time now, and people are starting to get desperate. They haven't been able to get roads into Black River, just now starting to get clear enough for cars to get through at a very slow rate between trees and power lines and debris. Brandon, where are people staying? I know a lot of these structures have been destroyed, so are there tents being set up or temporary shelters? Brandon, I'm not sure if you can hear us right now. We're just curious if you're aware of where people are staying, if there are temporary structures being built at this point. We may have lost his connection. Yeah, I know, we've had a lot of signal issues. And I mean, he was just saying that the infrastructure is incredibly damaged there in Black River and in the New Hope area. So not surprising that we're struggling to get a connection there with Brandon. Good information that he was able to bring us in the meantime. I know yesterday at this point, we didn't have much of an idea of exactly what things looked like. I mean, you could imagine given the category five status, but now we have a little bit of a better picture of just how bad things are there. And the good news as we look ahead with Melissa, because this is still a hurricane headed towards Bermuda, but Jeff, a category two in Bermuda is very well equipped for a low-end hurricane like that. Yeah, very different from other parts of the world. So you could see where Brandon was located. He's in New Hope now. He made it to the point of landfall. And again, so what, two days plus four or five hours, two days plus three hours ago. So about 51 hours ago, this storm was moving through this area with tenacity.

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