Montrealers rally to support hurricane-ravaged Jamaica

'There are people who are still sleeping on wet mattresses, they're still in wet clothes, they're still having to walk through inches of water.'

For a group of women packing barrels with emergency supplies at a nightclub in the Montreal borough of LaSalle on Monday, time is critical.

“It’s really heartbreaking to see what’s going on,” Samantha Donnette Spence said.

She and the others, who all have family in Jamaica, are helping to collect relief supplies as quickly as possible to send to Jamaica, one week after Hurricane Melissa ripped through the Caribbean island as a Category 5 storm.

“We were seeing family members actually having to hold up the windows in the home to ensure that the windows didn’t blow off,” Rashida Geddes said.

The storm made landfall with wind speeds reaching nearly 300 kilometres per hour. It sliced north across the western part of the country before losing strength and moving on to Cuba and Haiti.

It left more than 60 dead in the region, including more than 30 in Jamaica. Marsha Coore Lobban, the high commissioner of Jamaica to Canada, said more bodies are expected to be found.

“Between 400,000, 500,000 people have been displaced or impacted by (the hurricane), and that number could increase,” she told Global News.

She said that although authorities have made gains in opening some major roads and restoring power in a number of affected areas, many communities marooned by debris and floodwaters still remain largely inaccessible.