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Hurricane Melissa has reached Category 4 strength and is poised to even become a Category 5 hurricane before making landfall late tonight or early tomorrow.
The storm will unleash torrential rain and threaten to cause catastrophic flooding in the northern Caribbean, including Haiti and Jamaica, the US National Hurricane Centre said.
People on the island have been urged to seek shelter immediately.
‘Conditions (in Jamaica) are going to go down rapidly today,’ Jamie Rhome, the centre’s deputy director, said on Sunday.
‘Be ready to ride this out for several days.’
Melissa has maximum sustained winds of 145mph and is moving west at 5mph, the hurricane centre said.
The storm could drop torrential rains of up to 76cm on Jamaica and southern Haiti, and the Dominican Republic – some areas may see as much as 101cm of rain.
Extensive damage to infrastructure, power and communication outages, and the isolation of communities in Jamaica are expected.
Melissa should be near or over Cuba by late Tuesday, where it could bring up to 30cm of rain, before moving toward the Bahamas later on Wednesday.
Jamaica’s two main airports, the Norman Manley International Airport and the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, closed on Sunday.
Local officials ordered the evacuation in the seaside community of Old Harbour Bay in the southern parish of St Catherine on Sunday.
Evan Thompson, the principal director of the Meteorological Service of Jamaica, said the storm surge is expected mainly over the southern side of the island.
Some foreign governments are also preparing for the hurricane’s arrival in Jamaica.
The government of Antigua and Barbuda is housing visiting students at a hotel in Kingston. As of Sunday morning, 52 of them had checked in.
Students from other islands were staying at the same hotel, though it remained unclear whether they were sponsored by their governments.
The slow-moving storm has killed at least three people in Haiti and a fourth person in the Dominican Republic, where another person remains missing.
Haitian authorities said three people had died as a consequence of the hurricane, and another five were injured because of a collapsed wall.
Many residents are still reluctant to leave their homes, Haitian officials said.
The storm damaged nearly 200 homes in the Dominican Republic and knocked out water supply systems, affecting more than half a million customers. It also downed trees and traffic lights, unleashed a couple of small landslides and left more than two dozen communities isolated by floodwaters.
Melissa is the 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had predicted an above-normal season with 13 to 18 named storms.
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