On Wednesday, about 24 hours after Hurricane Melissa ravaged his country, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness took a helicopter tour of the devastated Caribbean island. As rotor blades whirred, he looked down at the apocalyptic scene below — houses with roofs torn off, uprooted trees flung across roads and endless piles of rubble and debris.
Later that day he visited a hospital in St Elizabeth, a large parish on the island’s southwestern coast where Melissa made landfall. Wearing sunglasses and a Jamaica cap and flanked by uniformed soldiers, he listed the woes facing the parish without embellishment: “Telecommunications?.?.?.?the entire infrastructure?.?.?.?is destroyed here.”
“The most terrifying experience of my life, and I would not want to see it again,” one of the hospital workers said to Holness in a video shared on social media.