Special Press Briefing: Hurricane Melissa Recovery
Address
By
Dr the Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At the
Special Press Briefing: Hurricane Melissa Recovery
On
November 6, 2025
______________________________________________________________
Good morning, Jamaica.
We are officially out of the preparation phase. We have done well in the preparation phase, but even the best laid plans would be laid to waste in a Category 5 hurricane. It’s as if you have gotten a knockout blow and you’re trying to reconstitute, get yourself up off the mat to say what do I do next, and that was kind of like the impact of Hurricane Melissa.
In the initial phases of the relief phase, it was almost as if it were a scramble. What is the relief phase? The relief phase is that period of time when the authorities of the Government, the civil society, private sector, and others seek to mobilize relief for those who are most impacted.
What is that kind of relief we’re talking about?
Food, water, medicine, clothing, emergency shelter and services, medical services, search and rescue, or in most cases now, search and recovery of bodies, other services as well, psychological and emotional, the mental health services, and in our case the desperate effort to restore some form of connectivity because the loss of connection has also been significant, which adds to the emotional and mental health crisis that we face, persons trying to get in touch with loved ones person feeling disconnected who have for almost all their lives relied upon being able to pick up the phone and call a loved one.
In the initial few days, there was a scramble, and that scramble essentially was, my hand is up, I need help, and the system trying to respond to the loudest voices or the most frantic wave of hands. As of today, we are out of that phase. Now, a systematic response will take over in the relief effort, and you would see that the Government has made certain actions to ensure that there is a systematic response. Let me say it in another way.
I hear the cry of every baby that is now hungry in a community that is not yet reached. It goes to bed with me and I have to think of it in this way, do I try myself to jump on a helicopter with a package to reach the baby that is crying or do I try to develop a system to get more helicopters in, to get more packages put together, to get more supplies in, to get more support, to be able to reach those babies that are crying while at the same time saying to Keith, and Daryl, and Minister Tufton get out there in the scramble. So, that is what you have been seeing, people individually going out there trying to relieve the human suffering, but that is not a sustainable response. The sustainable response is what you would see the Government doing now.
We have to streamline ODPEM, both as the Office of Disaster Preparedness, which that function was done, that phase is over, and now we are in the phase of the emergency management, which is the relief. Now, let’s just be clear, the government can’t stand up ODPEM with its own parallel structure of having all the people that would be necessary to pack the relief items, to load the trucks, to move the trucks to where they have to be stored, to clear the roads; all those little minor functions that make the big service works and keep them and pay them throughout the year for every year, even when there is no disaster. Where that capability exists is in the JDF. It is a multifunctional capability, and at this point, I do commend the JDF and, of course, the JCF as well.
The JDF is the repository of the logistics and engineering capabilities of the Government, and in hindsight, as I reflect on how we have executed policy, not many Jamaicans would know this, but in the last 10 years of my administration, we have invested heavily in the JDF. In fact, we have doubled the size of the JDF, both in terms of men and women, material, equipment and technology. We made an investment a few years ago in expanding our fleet of helicopters, expanding our offshore patrol vessels, expanding our radars, expanding our communications, increasing the number of Bush Masters and expanding the number of units that are in the JDF.
Today, it is paying off. The logistical capability of the JDF is certainly best in class in the region, and that is what is giving us now the horsepower to be able to deal with a Category 5 level disaster. The JDF gives the legs and arms to the management functions of the emergency. It makes sense that there is seamless coordination between the JDF and ODPEM, and therefore, you would recognise the movement of ODPEM to OPM, where the JDF is already under the portfolio of the Office of the Prime Minister.
The administration of the JDF, as well, which was formally under National Security, will also move to the Office of the Prime Minister, and we have appointed someone to now head the ODPEM, seconded from the JDF, so we expect that there will be seamless operations.
Why is this so?
In the relief phase, there may be a sense that we will do this for a few weeks. I want to just bring everybody’s mind to the reality that this will be a few-month operation and that the country needs to understand this. We have relief entities here, some of them are capable of carrying out long-term relief, but most of them are not capable to carry out long-term relief and will take up stumps and leave the theater of operations after a few weeks so the Government has to have that base capability to be able to sustain the relief effort for a long period of time, and that is what I have been working on to ensure that your government has that staying capability to bring relief to six parishes and other divisions and constituencies in other parishes that are impacted. We don’t have the exact number of persons who are impacted, but we can estimate that it would be somewhere in the region of about 600,000 persons.
Now think of it, we have never had a sustained operational capability to bring constant relief efforts to 600,000 persons, and what that requires, so the planning that has to go into that for the logistics and management takes some time. In our case, only a few days before we can stand it up so that we can reach every crying baby who is hungry.
Commander Gayle has been tasked. The CDS already knows what her task is. They will be working together seamlessly under the administrative leadership of the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister, former Chief of Defence Staff, Rocky Meade. That however, needs to be augmented by best in class international support, and you can’t get better than the United Nations.
Last week, Sunday, I had a call with the UN Secretary General. The UN Secretary General is a friend of Jamaica. He has visited me a few times. We’re always working closely together on climate change, on financing for development, and he does have a special place in his heart for Jamaica, and I said to him what we needed was the best in class logistics capabilities and within a few days… In fact, yesterday I had a meeting with the Deputy Secretary General in charge of these kinds of operations from UNOPS, and they are mobilizing a full team that will come and support the logistics and management efforts of ODPEM.
So yes, we have capabilities, but as I have said, no matter what capability you thought you had, when you are hit by a Category 5 hurricane, you must get even greater and better capabilities and so UNOPS is here. I know they have had several meetings with private sector, I believe civil society, and they will be embedded in ODPEM and the idea is after this experience, the technical know how and capabilities will be transferred to ODPEM so we are expecting that after this ODPEM will be even stronger in terms of its ability to manage large scale disasters.
At that point, I would segue into saying that international support for Jamaica’s relief and recovery effort is significant. I don’t want to call everybody’s name now. I leave the Minister of Foreign Affairs to give a comprehensive review of all the countries that have reached out to us and I’ve had direct conversations with several world leaders about how they can help.
The relief effort is obviously being supported, but the conversations have moved passed the relief stage now where we’re talking about recovery, and that’s where I am engaging several world leaders as to how they can play a role in the recovery from the disaster. You would have heard me say in the presentation to Parliament that the damage could be anywhere from US$6 to US$7 billion. That is a conservative estimate. I have seen one economy saying something much more. I don’t want to be alarmist, but we are going through the process of trying to assess the damage. But it is one thing to lose the physical assets of production, which by the way, if you were to compare the disaster of COVID to this disaster, we didn’t lose any productive asset.
In this one, we have lost productive assets. We have lost farms. We have lost businesses. We have lost schools, and we have to go and rebuild them. You have to put on top of that what it is going to cost to sustain the relief phase, what it’s going cost us for debris management; a major part of the operations, what it’s going to cost us to sustain the food packages. There’s a notion that we’re getting a lot of aid and that will carry you through. That will carry for a couple weeks if so many. We are going to have to put the budgetary allocation to carry the relief effort and that is going to be significant.
Then there is a cleanup operation, which is a quite separate operation from debris management because once you move away the debris, that is the initial debris from the storm, then now you have to go and figure out to clear roads, to move all the debris of houses that have been blown down, and everybody will soon start putting their old beds and couches and old fridge and everything you’re going to see start to pile up, which is why we have indicated that we will have a national cleanup week. It might very well stretch into months because the level of debris is significant and how that is going to be disposed of and the cost of that, that is something we will have to address.
And then we have to figure out now the parallel systems to get people back into school, to get hospitals up and running, to get businesses running; all of those come with a cost that we will have to foot. So, in addition to losing your productive capacity, you now have to take on expenditure that you did not budget for. So the $6 to $7 or $8 billion, that’s just what we have lost. What we have to spend additionally, we are in that process now of totaling it up to see what it comes to then the recovery phase.
I want Jamaicans to understand the magnitude of the problem. Why am I saying this? How you feel will largely guide how you act, and there are a lot of people out there who are deliberately creating misinformation, and my job is to give you the correct information. If you choose not to listen to it, that’s your business, but at least the correct information must be out there.
I’ve seen someone say, Prime Minister don’t like criticism. Nonsense. Not every opinion makes sense. I am not one who fears criticism but there are people who fear me when I respond to them. Be assured that I will respond to any nonsense that is put out. Not to be distracted, but the critical ones, because managing information is also an important part of the disaster management. If you allow people to cast your nation into despair and grief, to smother hope, to ignore the heroic efforts that people are making and to just focus on the negative, then we will have a negative outlook in a time when we need people to be positive in their outlook about our recovery. So, I ask all Jamaicans of good mind and goodwill to stand up to those who are seeking to become popular on negativity.
Outside of that, there has to be a critical focus on the reestablishment of normalcy. Now, even though we have broken up the emergency management into phases, it doesn’t mean that everything happens sequentially, that you have to come out of the planning phase before you enter the relief phase, before you go into recovery. No. What we’re trying to do is do everything almost simultaneously so even though we are in the relief phase, we are already planning the recovery phase, and a part of that is to restore normalcy. We want normalcy in electricity, normalcy in telecommunications, get the roads back up and running. That’s one indication of normalcy, but an important part of normalcy is to get commerce up and running.
Now, as I toured through Jamaica and I intend to go and visit some more of the areas that are hit, but I had to break that to make sure that the organization and strategy and policy is effective, what is clear is that local commerce has been badly hit. The local shops are closed, the local pharmacies are closed, markets are closed. We need to get those stood up. Private sector has a role to play in that and I see where they’ve started getting the gas stations open, ensuring that the large distributors are open, the large supermarkets and wholesale are open, especially in the urban areas.
I like that, but I also want the small shop in Adelphi or in Spring Mount or wherever else, that those shops reopen. Now, they can’t reopen for one main reason, they don’t have electricity. That’s one, and the second is that suppliers can’t get to them. The distributive trade, which by the way is an incredible logistics operation, they supply thousands of shops every day with trucks going all over Jamaica that has been hit and they can’t call to place orders, and some of them can’t access cash so I’ve asked the Minister of Industry Investment and Commerce to develop a plan to support the small shops in communities right across Jamaica to get them up and running.
One of the first things that we have done is we have identified some generators and we’re going to make those generators available. We’re going to start with 50 in the most impacted and remote communities. We will loan them the generators, but of course there will be some requirements for compliance issues and to ensure that they are established operations that we can enter into cooperation with.
Of course, we would have to verify that there are a legitimate operation so we would ask the JPs, the police and other established persons in the area to vouch for their credibility and we are going to ask the Jamaica Business Development Corporation to lead that along with the DBJ. We’re going to also ask them if they would be willing to partner with the Government to give us storage capacity. Some of them may have a strong room, they may have a room or two where we can store things that would multiply the number of areas that we have from which we can stage operations. Because right now CDS tells me that they have 22 staging areas that they have established right across Jamaica, which will be a hub and spoke operation so they will move from big warehouses to these small hubs, and then from these small hubs to smaller areas of distribution; that might not be enough.
Eventually, we will have to move from this operation of us moving items so we move from main warehouse to these spoke and hub operations, and then we distribute. The physical distribution of the relief is an expensive operation, and it poses some risks to us as well. I’ve seen video circulating where I’ve seen a Jamaica Defense force struck, and people are there waving. It wasn’t too bad but even in a disaster, we must maintain our dignity. Even in a disaster, we must never give the view that there is lawlessness and even if we are hungry and there is suffering, we must maintain our dignity. And the way in which the relief operation is done must be done in a way that protects the dignity of the people so a part of what we have tasked ODPEM, JDF and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security is to ensure that there is this standardized process that protects the dignity of the people that we’re giving aid.
But as I was saying, we can’t carry this on forever or for too long. At some point, we will transition to a voucher or a coupon system where instead of carrying the bag of relief items, you will get something that is equivalent to cash and you can go to your nearest shop in your area where we will stock and supply them and you get your items but to do that, we have to stand up those shops. We have to provision them, give them electricity, give them internet connection, and so we’re working on that plan and in the coming weeks, you will start to see that plan come to fruition so that for the foreseeable future of the next few months, there is an effective and robust system to deliver relief as we pivot to the recovery stage.
I want to thank the members of the media who are here who have been covering the disaster, who have been faithfully attending these press briefings and the media who has carried the press briefing because that’s very important for the informational of the citizen and so I want to thank the journalists who are here and the media, which is privately held, and they are sacrificing their advertising time for this and I want to thank them for doing that.
In summary, there’s no question that the initial relief phase started off a bit slowly. I did some research this morning looking at the initial relief efforts for Katrina, for other major storms in the region, and Jamaica has done well. I mean in five to six days, what we have stood up is incredible. This is not to say that there isn’t human suffering. Please don’t mistake me, but if you compare to Puerto Rico, to Antigua, to Dominica and to the United States, which has had several major storms, what we have done is incredible.
As of today, the communities that we have not reached yet, the persons who are sending me messages to say I haven’t gotten, the system will now respond and will respond quickly to get into those communities. At the time of my next update, I should be able to say how many of a number of communities affected, this is a percentage that we reached. The target now is to get at least initial welfare and humanitarian response to every single Jamaican who has not yet gotten attention.
Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen.