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

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