Dear Editor,

Jamaica is still counting the cost of Hurricane Melissa. Homes are being repaired, roads restored, and communities slowly stitched back together. These recovery efforts are necessary and commendable, especially in parishes that took the full force of the storm.

But while we rebuild what was broken, we must ask an uncomfortable question: Are we preparing for what is coming next?

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season begins in six months. Yet there has been little public discussion about constructing new hurricane shelters specifically designed to withstand Category 5 storms. Jamaica continues to depend largely on designated shelters — schools and public buildings — that were never engineered for the extreme winds, storm surge, and prolonged isolation that now define modern hurricanes.

Recently, The Bahamas opened a purpose-built hurricane shelter and community centre designed to survive Category 5 conditions. It is not just a shelter of last resort, but a daily-use community facility that transforms into a fortress during disasters. That example matters. Climate change is not a future threat, it is already reshaping the intensity and unpredictability of storms affecting the Caribbean.

Hurricane Melissa showed us how fragile even newer infrastructure can be. If public buildings constructed in recent decades can suffer severe damage, what confidence should citizens have that ordinary shelters will hold when the next major storm makes landfall at full strength?

Preparedness cannot be reduced to shelter lists and press briefings during emergencies. It requires hard decisions about engineering standards, investment priorities, and transparency. Are we planning Category-5-rated shelters? If so, where? If not, why?

Recovery without resilience is repetition. Each hurricane season we promise to “build back better”, yet we rarely build forward — towards structures designed for the storms we know are coming. The question is not whether Jamaica can afford to construct hardened hurricane shelters. The real question is whether we can afford not to.

Six months is not a long time. The time to begin that conversation — and those constructions — is now, before the next storm forces it upon us.

Dudley McLean II

dm15094@gmail.com