PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — The website reads: “Water flows through, under and around Sandals South Coast.” Those features were just what three families had in mind for their annual October trip to the islands. A significant storm was possible, but unlikely.
Hurricane Melissa bears down on Jamaica and threatens to be the island’s strongest recorded storm
“So we had heard about a tropical depression,” Jessica Pope told Nexstar’s WAVY. “We knew, but we travel to the Caribbean every October. So we do this every year and never had this problem. So when we left on Tuesday, we knew there was a tropical depression. By Thursday here, they started saying this is going to be a major event.”
Pope shared the following photos from their trip:
As the storm transitioned from an inconvenience to possibly unsurvivable in a matter of hours, the families started looking for flights to head back home.
“They were on Delta flights,” Pope said. “They couldn’t get any flights out. We were on American, and by the time we started looking for flights, prices were like $3,000 a ticket. We found one that had a ticket for like a few hundred dollars, and it was one flight. And so I would have had to leave my husband, or we would leave our friends. There was nothing we could get six of us on and go.”…