Jamaica was yesterday spared the worst effects of Tropical Storm Elsa with only a few parishes experiencing hours of heavy rains, something of a disappointment for some Jamaicans, and a relief for others, who had braced for severe weather conditions based on the forecast for Sunday.
Motorists experinced stalled cars and some amount of flooding in the corridors often affected constituted the extent of the impact in the Corporate Area, with some residents venturing out on foot in-between intermittent showers, which by late afternoon had subsided, notwithstanding ominously overcast conditions.
Jamaicans are being warned that, with the island having had a close call so early in the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, this is a warning sign climate change.
Acting director general of the ODPEM Richard Thompson said the Elsa threat should be used as an impetus to bolster preparation for the rest of the season.
“You do have persons that still say Jamaica is ‘God-blessed’, so this and that won’t happen — but it is getting way better. This is early in the hurricane season, an unusual situation where you have a system forming in the Caribbean at such an early point in the hurricane season.
“We normally have this kind of formation August to September. It’s a bit out of character, showing that climate change is real. It gives us an area of concern that it’s so early and a system would have tracked so close to us. The season is shaping up to be a very active one, [and] hopefully, we will not see something similar to last year where we had close to 30 systems,” Thompson told the Observer.
He underscored that Jamaicans should remain alert, despite the impact of Elsa being less than initially anticipated, bearing in mind that forecasts are made with the best information available at the time of tracking a storm.
Source-Jamaica Observer
