Mentally draining, but Cave Valley rebounds from Melissa
Published:Sunday | January 18, 2026 | 12:10 AMKaren Madden - Sunday Gleaner Writer
It is a fight that has exacted physical, mental, and emotional pain, but business operators in Cave Valley, St Ann, are clawing their way back following devastation when Hurricane Melissa dumped thousands of gallons of water on the town, completely submerging sections.
With no insurance coverage, due to the high flood risks, building back their businesses from the ground up has put an unimaginable dent in the savings of some while others have had to renegotiate loans.
Residents of Cave Valley are accustomed to floodwaters whenever it rains persistently, but they are at one where the frightening water level caused by Category 5 Hurricane Melissa was unprecedented.
Robert Chen, owner and operator of Lyn Chen Better Best Hardware, navigated a drenched store and goods, discarding what he had to and reopening just ahead of the Christmas break while still cleaning up.
Trying to do our best
“It was very difficult, but we just tried to put that out of our minds and just do what needed to be done. We still have things to clean up, so just doing what we can and trying to do our best with the situation. Whatever we could sell, we sold.”
Chen employs six permanent staff plus temporary workers on a needs basis, and he was happy he was able to keep them on during the difficult time. But the final figure for the damage sustained is yet to be defined, fearing that figure would challenge his mental fortitude:
“I don’t want to put it on my head, so I just leave it, but I will have to put it together for the accountant. But it will be couple millions well as we had just restocked. One supplier alone we took over $900,000 in goods just before the hurricane, and everything was destroyed, so from that, I didn’t bother to think about anything else. I just leave it. We also lost our office equipment, including computers, and we have lost all our files” he told The Sunday Gleaner.
And with the gloomy forecast that Jamaica will see equally or more powerful hurricanes in the future, Chen has learnt a valuable lesson.
“Stock less. Just stock less. Being a hardware and lumber store, it’s hard to move all these items and find a place to store them, so it’s really just stocking less.”
Young business owner Serita Williams runs a printery and stationery supplies store and also has a business interest in a meat mart on the same premises.
She told The Sunday Gleaner that the meat mart suffered a total loss with hundreds of pounds of rotted meat and other food items dumped after the water receded while the printery suffered significant losses.
“Most persons in the town here lost almost everything, if not everything. Persons just have to pick up the pieces all by themselves, trust mi, and it’s hard, but we have to do what we have to do. We have to survive.”
In terms of dollar value, Williams says the loss at the printery amounted to approximately half a million dollars while the meat mart, which also lost five large deep freezers, had losses running into multimillions.
“Mentally, it’s draining. It’s really stressing to think about. For me, I can speak definitely for me, because where I started, I started just like a year ago, and I got loans to start the business, and seeing that I lost so many things then I found myself in a place [where] I can’t pay back that loan but yet still I have to start again. So that drains you mentally.”
Williams heaved a deep sigh as she told The Sunday Gleaner how close the young business people came to giving up.
“Where physically is concerned, there were days when we come want to clean up, and when we see the state of the place, we just go back home because that’s just it. You come and you say alright, I am going to move this from here to here, and you move this, and when you look around and see the amount of work that is here, the mind, the stress that is on the mind cause you to just go home without even doing a thing. There are days when you come and you just go back home.”
Both businesses, which had been enjoying booming sales as they offered goods and services that residents previously had to travel miles to access, reopened in January with the meat mart, in particular, missing the economic uptick that usually comes as Jamaicans stock up on meat and other food supplies for the traditional Christmas dinner.
Williams credits her faith and the knowledge that Cave Valley residents depend on them for the strength to continue going in the face of such devastation and mounting financial losses.
Metres away, Annmarie Rose, who operates Rose’s Auto Parts and Accessories, smiled with the Sunday Gleaner team last Wednesday but vividly recalled how floodwaters ran through her store, destroying her stock.
“It was so disastrous, it was so terrible, but we fight back, pick up the broken pieces, you know, and we have to start all over again. In the midst of it, we have to give thanks.”
Rose told The Sunday Gleaner that she was able to resume business days before Christmas Day but admits that her sales were nothing compared to previous Christmas holidays, and they are still not at the level she was before the hurricane hit. She has not yet put a total dollar value on her losses.
Hurricane Melissa tore off the roof of the market and the adjoining public-transportation centre, resulting in vendors not returning in full as they have to battle sun and rain.
Taxi operators now park on the streets, obstructing traffic entering the town’s lone gas station even as the police try to maintain order.
But taxi operator Lynsford Dussard insisted that staying in the park at the mercy of the elements was not an option.
“Because the park nuh convenient. We need a proper, convenient place fi di park because we need shelter for the customers dem so that dem able to shelter when rain fall. We nuh have nuh shelter. We need shelter. The police dem a complain seh wi out here suh, [but] wi cannot guh inna di park without wi have a proper park. So now wi sometimes get ticketed by the police for parking out here. But wi manage to explain to them, and they say we can park out here for now, for the time being, but we don’t know how long, and we have no idea how long the parish council will take to fix the park.”
The Sunday Gleaner spoke with Alesha, who works at Willis Gas Station, which was covered by water that damaged critical equipment and left goods unsalvageable.
“We coping. One of the pumps still not working, so one pump alone working, and we had to replace another one. We got back light but still no Internet. Believe mi, it was terrible. I stayed at home and look down on the town and all I could see was water.”
Using Category 4 Hurricane Ivan in 2004 as her reference, Alesha told The Sunday Gleaner that the height the water from Melissa reached was devastating.
“The town just start pulling back together. Many people, yes, in the community are still out of homes, and stuff. They are staying with relatives, and stuff, but the business side is coming. It’s rebuilding slowly, but it’s coming back together.”