A Boston family on vacation in Jamaica doesn’t know when they’ll be able to return home as Hurricane Melissa hits the island.
“They closed all the restaurants, they closed all the pools, everything’s getting boarded up so the glass doesn’t shatter,” said Leilani Perez, who’s from Hyde Park.
Perez came to the resort in Jamaica for a vacation from Boston last Friday with her aunt and mother to celebrate a birthday.
today she says the hotel is all boarded up as they get ready to evacuate to the resort’s convention center.
Hundreds of guests will stay there as Hurricane Melissa hits the island Monday night.
“Once they come knock on our door, they want us to get our essentials, they want us to walk in a single file line, follow the team members and we’re all going to be led to the room and we basically don’t know what the room looks like or the measures that are gonna be taken when we get there,” said Perez.
Matthew Cappucci is a storm chaser and meteorologist from Massachusetts, who flew into the storm Sunday night on the Hurricane Hunters flight.
“In the daytime it’s like being in a washing machine or a car wash, you can’t see anything out the window, at night, it’s like that but dark, until you get into the eye,” said Cappucci, who’s tracking the storm from Florida today.
He says it was unreal to fly into the eye of this storm as 50,000-foot thunder clouds whipped around them from all directions.
“You’re in this little oasis of calm that you’ll only have for a few moments, it was simultaneously peaceful, mesmerizing, beautiful and also destructive, just heart-sinking knowing what’s going to anthem Jamaica,” said Cappucci.
Cappucci says Jamaica will never be the same after this.
The storm is expected to bring 30 to 40 inches of rain, which may cause mudslides and severe flooding that could wipe out communities.
Perez says they’ll be hunkering down and hoping for the best.
“So it’s kind of just like a bottle of emotions, like a rollercoaster of emotions,” said Perez.
Perez says they were supposed to fly back to Boston on Thursday, but her flight was just canceled Monday, and it’s unclear when the airports will reopen in Jamaica.
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