Hurricane Melissa was the third Category 5 hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic Hurricane season.
This is only the second time there have been this many Category 5 hurricanes, the other being the extremely active 2005 hurricane season, where there were twice as many storms — 28 — as there have been up to this point. Melissa is a record-breaker in several ways — it is tied for the second strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, and it is the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall, both by windspeed (185mph) and barometric pressure (892mbar). As with many hurricanes recently, Melissa underwent rapid intensification, doubling its windspeed in 24 hours, and was a slow-moving water-laden storm dropping more than a foot of water on Jamaica and Cuba before making yet another landfall still as a hurricane, on the Bahamas.
The effects of climate change on supercharging hurricanes cannot legitimately be denied. What fuels these storms is the heat of the water beneath them, and the oceans have absorbed 90% of the heat that humans have been pumping into the atmosphere.
The warmer the water, the more energy can be transferred into a storm, and the stronger and more dangerous it becomes. The heat of the atmosphere also makes a difference, since the warmer the air, the more water it can hold, and along with strong winds and slow forward movement, the more rain it will drop. These rapidly intensifying storms can also interfere with hurricane preparations and increase casualties, since people will be preparing for what they thought was going to be a weaker storm and may be taken by surprise by the final intensity.
In the last few years, there has been an increase in rapidly intensifying storms in the Atlantic. Fortunately, in the last few years, storm predictions have become more accurate, and the strength of Melissa was accurately forecast. Unfortunately, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which contains the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, is one of the agencies that had steep staff and budget cuts, which puts future predictions at risk. The last climate-influenced factor to take into account is the sea level rise in the Caribbean, where storm surge will be exacerbated, adding to the damage.
No matter how good the predictions, a landfall from a Category 5 storm will cause catastrophic damage. According to NOAA, “A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.”
For many of us, this was the case after Hurricane Ivan made landfall west of Pensacola as a strong Category 3 storm in September 2004. I know I spent months rebuilding my house without electricity and water for a lot of that time.
Although it’s practically impossible to build homes to survive this kind of damage from a storm of this magnitude, communities have used previous storms to improve building codes and prevent damage from lesser storms.
When Category 5 Hurricane Andrew made landfall in August 1992 with 165 mph winds, it destroyed or damaged more than 125,000 homes, leaving about 250,000 people homeless in South Florida. Entire communities like Homestead and Florida City, near Everglades National Park, where I used to work, were flattened. This was due to the combination of high winds combined with outdated building codes, shoddy construction, and poor inspection practices, according to the insurance industry.
Because of the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, Florida building codes were substantially revised. The first post-Andrew code, the South Florida Building Code, was enacted in 1994 and expanded to the rest of the state in 2002, and was further revised in 2017. Among the changes were to create a statewide code that mandated roofs be more securely attached to a building’s walls, better materials had to be used, doors and windows needed to be impact-resistant or protected by shutters, foundations needed to be reinforced, and there would be tougher requirements for building permits and inspections.
In a study done after Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida with 130 mph winds in 2017, it was found that Florida homes built after 1994 and to the Florida-specific building codes were more resilient to wind damage. The study found that building to the new codes was very effective in preventing the destruction of homes due to wind during these Hurricanes and resulted in significantly less damage to wall and roof coverings and loss of those components while also minimizing window breakage. And almost 95% of homes constructed after 2008 sustained little or no damage.
The ability to change building codes in response to storm damage came to a grinding halt with the passage of SB 180 in the 2025 legislative session.
