Hurricane Melissa is churning toward Jamaica as the island’s worst-ever storm, with high winds and flooding rains already pummelling coastal areas in the hours before landfall.

Melissa’s top winds reached 298 kilometres per hour, up from 289 kph earlier Tuesday. It’s a Category 5 storm, the highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. The dangerous storm was about 65 kilometres south-southeast of Negril, Jamaica, at the western tip of the island, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in an 11 a.m. eastern time update.

If the storm maintains this intensity, it will be the strongest to hit in the Atlantic since Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas in 2019, also with 298-kph winds, said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University.

While Melissa is pic

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