Marylanders stuck in hurricane-damaged Jamaica waiting to go home

Several Marylanders who traveled to Jamaica are trying to figure out their next moves after Hurricane Melissa ravaged the islands with category 5-force winds.

Melissa knocked out power to 70% of Jamaica after making landfall on Tuesday as one of the strongest storms on record. At one point, peak wind gusts reached 185 mph. 

The storm weakened as it moved toward Cuba and the Bahamas.

"As to what's happening in Jamaica, just to help, not just us people from Baltimore who need to get off this island, but anybody else in the world who is here that needs to get home to their family," Maryland resident Allysha Jacobs said. 

Caught in the hurricane

While millions grapple with the destruction the storm left behind, tourists who are still in Jamaica are trying to figure out how they're going to get home. 

Jacobs, who is from Baltimore, told WJZ that she and her husband are staying at the Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort & Spa to attend a wedding.

"My husband, who is a Caribbean native himself, and one of his friends were getting married this weekend, so we came to Jamaica to attend the wedding," Jacobs said. "We flew out of BWI on Friday, landed in Jamaica."

Jacobs said they heard about the hurricane on Saturday.

"And that's when the spiral of events started happening," Jacobs said.

Now, with the airports shut down, their plans to return to Maryland are in doubt.

"We went thinking we would be leaving Wednesday, to us having to leave Friday, and now knowing that the airports probably won't be open this weekend," Jacobs said.

"The ceiling in my room is gone" 

Jacobs said that she and others staying at the resort were about to get able to get a small portion of their stay waived due to damages from the storm, but they are worried the cost will go up because they do not know how long it will be before they can fly home.

"The ceiling in my room is gone. People have had no power," Jacobs said. "Other people's rooms have been completely flooded, and obviously nobody wants to pay for that, especially when you're in the middle of a natural disaster."

Jacobs continued, "Now, they're trying to get them to make some type of accommodations for the rest of the nights that we will be here, but we also don't know how long we're going to be here."

Working to get tourists home

With flights grounded and airports, like Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, closed tourists like Linda Hall don't know how or when they will get home.

"I was supposed to leave on Sunday, originally," Hall said "My flight got canceled, and then I tried to get on an earlier flight, but then that flight was oversold."

Hall visited the Hyatt Ziva in Montego Bay from Orlando, Florida, for a wedding with a friend. She said only one of them was able to get a flight out before the storm hit. 

"AC is all out. Water is out. Of course, service is really bad right now, so we've been without water since, I would say, about five o'clock this morning," Hall said. "They gave us care packages last night and the night before that, in case we weren't able to leave our rooms." 

Jamaica's leaders say all 25,000 international visitors who remained on the island while Hurricane Melissa made landfall are accounted for, and they're still working to assess the damage across the island. 

The Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston is expected to open for relief flights and humanitarian aid soon. 

Flights should be able to land to evacuate guests who wish to leave on Thursday.

Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica's tourism minister, also said leaders are still assessing the damage at Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, and hope that within the next two days, commercial flights there will restart.