‘I now know how a sitting duck feels’: What it is like to be in the path of 185mph Hurricane Melissa

As one of the most powerful storms on record makes landfall in Jamaica, Annie Paul files a dispatch from the country’s capital, where trees have crushed cars and exploding electricity transformers can be heard all around her

The wind comes with a roar that sounds like a hundred trains rushing at you at once. All we are hearing in Kingston is howling winds, and every now and again, an explosion, which is an electricity transformer blowing somewhere. It’s been raining non-stop since last night, and the ground is boggy and waterlogged. When its giant gusts whip up, it makes me shudder. I now know what a sitting duck feels like.

The word I’ve been using since yesterday is dread, bubbling up, and you try to calm it down and go about as normally as you can, while you can. You can fight this sense of impending horror. For in the wake of a storm, it’s not just what the winds wreak, but all that follows.

Looting and crime go through the roof, you have to worry about that kind of thing, as well as shortages of food. The population is already at their limit with how much things have gone up in price, so when a storm like this happens, it just compounds all of that. And I am trying to stifle that sense of creeping panic.

‘Are we all as insignificant as ants? These storms and these huge forces of nature make you realise how insignificant you are’ (SeeJamaica)

This thing has been coming for more than a week. We thought it was going to hit us last Thursday. Then last Thursday was bright and sunny all day long and not a drop of rain. And then they said no, it will come next week. People ended up hurricane shopping every day of the week since then, so every time you thought it was going to come tomorrow, it didn't. There was no bread to be found anywhere for the last week. Last night I cooked a beef curry thinking that my friends could come over in the evening but of course things deteriorated. Finally, today is the first day.

Landfall arouses a certain sense of dread in me. I can just imagine what’s going on in that radius of 13 miles where they have hurricane force winds, including St Elizabeth, where they were hit very badly two years ago. It also makes you wonder about what the meaning of life is and other profound questions. It makes you think, “There but for the grace of God go I”. It’s just a matter of luck that I happen to be in Kingston and that I didn’t buy a property in St Elizabeth, waiting for everything to go up in the wind and smoke.

The poet Kamau Brathwaite said the hurricane doesn’t roar in pentameter. We can’t describe it using the standard English language. That’s one of the problems – if you were able to interview people who were patois speakers they would put it so lyrically – it makes you realise how insignificant you are in the face of such strength and fury. You are a speck of sand on a little island, in the backyard of the US. Then it makes you wonder about life itself. Are we all as insignificant as ants?

‘The skies are impenetrably grey’: People walk down a road in Rocky Point, Jamaica (AP)

My French doors looked like they were going to burst open with the pressure and so I propped them open to face the storm. My upstairs neighbour has moved in because the wind up there is getting to her. But I don’t think I’m in any danger right now. I live in a solid concrete apartment building. The people going to shelters are the less fortunate who don’t have reliable housing or they live too close to rivers and gullies.

I’ve thought about the trees we’ll lose, the homes that will lose their roofs. But having lived through Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, it was almost as if the landscape appreciated the pruning. Within a couple of months, everything was bursting back. But at first it was scarred, it was like it was wounded. Everywhere you went, there were signs of the catastrophe. In Kingston, we have Hope Road, where all the telegraph poles were flattened so it looked like a railway line, right down from one end to the other. Nature bounces back. I don’t know whether these great big apartment buildings that are mushrooming all over the place in Kingston will have the same luck.

The skies are impenetrably grey. I can’t see the hills that normally I can see. It seems as if the sky has been packed with clouds, so thick that the sun could never break through. And that’s how you feel.