People in Jamaica are assessing the damage from one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the island.

Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

I am Vivian Noonan, Infa Leanna Bird. Good morning. Hurricane

Berle brought heavy rainfall and winds of up to 130 miles per hour yesterday. At least

one person was killed and another is missing.

Hundreds of people have taken refuge in government shelters amid fears of flooding.

Jamaica's Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the BBC financial planning ahead of the storm was crucial.

There could be storms or exogenous shocks that are much larger than what we can afford and then we would have to turn to the international community for support.

But it is important that the people of Jamaica know that for these kinds of weather events we've planned for them

and being prepared in this way has helped us to recover quickly.

Dr. Carey Wallace is the owner of the resort Negrill Hutts on Jamaica's West Coast.

The guests that we've had, we've moved them to the safest cottage that we have on the property and of course we have back of power and back of water storage and everything.

Usually, you know, it's it's it's September, October before we we start

worrying about about hurricanes each year, you know, getting into the hurricane season. So this is quite

abnormal. What I'm hoping is that it's not extending the hurricane season, but just maybe moving it forward a little.

The Caribbean in general is the most tourism-dependent region on planet Earth. And what that means is so many of us depend on tourism and

tourism by nature in the Caribbean is you know you have to be on the coastline so

of course the potential impact on this kind of global change in weather patterns would affect us significantly,

depending on the level of damage and how fast we can recover.

So if the storm surges, you know, are hitting down buildings and so on then this could set us back the entire season that we take to rebound.

I mean we're trying to get more and more resilient so that we recover faster and so we did the mitigation and preparation work and we are now you know

riding through that riding the storm and then hopefully we can clean up and bounce back as fast as we can.

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