Cave Valley (Jamaica), Nov 3 (EFE). - Mud still covers up to the second floor of numerous homes in Cave Valley, a mountain town in Jamaica that was flooded by Hurricane Melissa.
Walking through his home, the marks show that the water reached the ceiling. "We lost everything, the only thing we took were the documents," Knight told EFE, who lived in the house with her parents, brothers, and nephews. Two mattresses remain in the house's rooms, which will share the same fate as the other belongings, and a kitchen whose stoves are unlikely to work again.
The seven members of this family are now staying at the home of friends who live on a hill and whose house was not as affected. She also looks with desolation at her hardware store, Robert Chen's office. "Everything is completely devastated in this area. All their folders, files, invoices, and computers have been rendered useless."
Nearby, a gas station still has the plastic protections on the fuel dispensers that employees placed to keep them from getting wet from the rain, never thinking that the water would cover everything, just like in the rest of Cave Valley.
"We are now collecting all that was damaged and cleaning up," Christopher Campbell, owner of a small supermarket in the locality, told EFE.
"It's all mud, just mud and water," the man told EFE, predicting a "hard and long road to recovery." John estimates that the situation will not improve until February or March of the next year and that the reconstruction of Jamaica could take up to five years.
Downed power poles, ravaged banana plantations, and felled bamboo trunks denote the harshness of what happened. The power of this hurricane, which hit Jamaica as a Category 5, caused the Cave River to overflow, its flow unleashing unimaginable levels of water onto the town's center.
"The Cave Valley community was completely flooded. Like other Jamaicans, he complains that "there is still no response from the government."
"We continue to try to help our brothers and sisters, that's why we are here, to take care of each other and help each other in this moment," he says.
"We have lost everything"
Young woman Sandreka Knight drags some cushions to the front of her house, which at first glance are difficult to identify as they are completely covered in sticky mud. She throws them with a smile onto a pile of furniture and clothes that were lost due to the river's flooding.
The merchant explains that Cave Valley has flooded before, "but never to this level": "This is the first time this building has flooded," he laments. Several people are trying to remove mud and wash various products such as mannequins, sodas, clothing, and refrigerators in the supermarket, where the water reached 1.2 meters.
"At this moment, when most people are in trouble, they are here trying to help," Campbell highlights, who sincerely thanks his neighbors for their help. Patrick Jhon also came to help, who is sweeping forcefully and hastily the mud that covers the entire second floor of a house, while a group of people helps him remove some items to move them into a truck.
On the ground floor of the house, everything has been lost. John comes from the Manchester district, where all the roofs of the houses were blown off by the hurricane, but he traveled to Cave Valley because the inhabitants of this population "are trapped in the mud."
The town's inhabitants are busy cleaning their homes and belongings in an effort to save something amidst so much devastation. From the top of the mountain range, the view of the valleys is beautiful, but soon the effects of Melissa's passage begin to be evident.
