Hurricane Melissa wrecks Christmas for W’land families
Published:Friday | November 28, 2025 | 12:06 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU
For thousands of Jamaicans, the warmth of Christmas will be more than a memory this year. Hurricane Melissa, now recorded as the most violent storm ever to strike the island, has left families facing not only structural ruin but emotional collapse.
In lower Darliston, Westmoreland, Natasha Tomlinson stands on the bare concrete foundation where her four-bedroom board house once stood. Today, it is a graveyard of splintered lumber — nails pulled, boards stacked — a desperate preparation for help that has yet to arrive.
“I got two men to pull out the nails from the boards and packed them together in case I get any help,” she said, her voice raw from days of crying. “If I get two workmen, I will start something… but it doesn’t look possible for now because everybody got damage.”
Melissa didn’t just take her home; it stole her Christmas.
“Christmas celebration will not be the same,” she said, turning away as tears forced their way down. “Not like before… no house. I just want to spend Christmas with my family.”
Her son—mute since birth—along with her daughter-in-law and their two babies are displaced, longing to return, but with nowhere to return to.
“Every day it depresses them not being in their own home,” she said. “This spot right here is where my family always comes,” she said, gesturing to the bare slab where decades of memories once lived.
What remains of her life fits in a corner.
“Only these I saved, the dresser, the chest of drawers, and a barrel. I can’t find the deep refrigerator. I found one foot off the dining table and two black tanks, I lost everything.”
A short drive away, another story of devastation and defiance unfolds.
Alson Hughes, a carpenter for nearly two decades, lost his two-bedroom wooden home when Melissa’s winds smashed through Darliston.
His voice carried neither bitterness nor surrender, only clarity.
“I can’t give up. Options in life… is to give up and die, or to hold on and survive. I choose the hardest of the two, which is to hold on, beat back the hardship, and survive.”
He has lived in wooden houses for 19 years, but Melissa has convinced him that the next chapter must be different.
“I will build back, but this time with building blocks, steel and cement, proper decking,” he said. “Given what happened to my board house and how the storm dealt with other people’s roofs, I am building a little one room on board house now, but as the opportunity presents itself, will build a concrete home for me and my two daughters.”