Hurricane Melissa heads for Cuba, Jamaica’s southwest left ‘underwater’
Zahra Burton
Updated
Kingston | Hurricane Melissa churned north-east toward Cuba’s second-largest city on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) as a powerful category 4 storm, hours after making landfall in nearby Jamaica as the strongest-ever storm to hit the Caribbean island nation.
Melissa struck land near Jamaica’s southwestern town of New Hope, packing maximum sustained winds of 295 kilometres per hour, the US National Hurricane Centre said in an advisory, well above the minimum strength of a category 5 storm, the most powerful level on the Saffir-Simpson scale.