A man walks past a fallen tree after Hurricane Melissa struck a neighborhood in Santiago de Cuba on Wednesday. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images
Hurricane Melissa swept through the northern Caribbean on Wednesday after hitting Cuba’s second-biggest city, isolating hundreds of rural communities, unleashing devastation in Jamaica and drenching Haiti, where at least 25 were killed.
Melissa struck Jamaica on Tuesday as the strongest-ever hurricane to directly hit its shores, with sustained winds of 298 km/h, well above the minimum strength for a Category 5, the strongest classification for hurricanes.
As of midnight Irish time, Melissa was a Category 1 hurricane bringing wind, rain and storm surges as it moved northeast through the Bahamas archipelago, whose government earlier flew out nearly 1,500 people in what it called one of its largest evacuation operat
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