A free, data-light utility panel for daily life in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados and the Bahamas. It puts four things on one fast page. First, hurricane readiness: a plain-English Saffir-Simpson explainer with island-specific reality notes, live wind and rain for your capital city, and links to the US National Hurricane Center and each island’s official met office. Second, power outage links for JPS, T&TEC, Barbados Light & Power and Bahamas Power & Light, with a downed-line safety card. Third, money tools: live mid-market rates for JMD, TTD, BBD and BSD, a converter, and a remittance true-cost calculator built for the US–Caribbean corridor. Fourth, official status portals for passports, CXC results, tax and driver’s licences. No app install, no account — it loads fast on any phone, which matters most when the grid is shaky.
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale rates sustained winds only — it says nothing about rain, storm surge or how slowly a system crawls over your island, which are often the deadlier parts. Still, it is the shared language of every advisory, so it pays to know what the numbers mean in practice. A useful rule of thumb: damage rises roughly exponentially, not linearly, with category. A Category 4 does not do “twice” the damage of a Category 2 — historically it does many times more. Treat anything at Category 3 or above (a “major” hurricane) as an event you prepare days for, not hours.
| Category | Sustained winds | What it typically does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 119–153 km/h (74–95 mph) | Roof, gutter and fence damage; snapped branches; power cuts lasting days from downed lines. |
| 2 | 154–177 km/h (96–110 mph) | Major roof and siding damage; shallow-rooted trees down; near-total power loss for days to weeks. |
| 3 | 178–208 km/h (111–129 mph) | Structural damage to well-built homes; water and electricity out for days to weeks; “major” threshold. |
| 4 | 209–251 km/h (130–156 mph) | Severe damage — most of the roof structure and some exterior walls lost; areas uninhabitable for weeks or months. |
| 5 | ≥ 252 km/h (≥ 157 mph) | Catastrophic — a high share of framed homes destroyed; long-term power loss; some areas uninhabitable for months. |
The category is only half of your risk — the other half is geography and building stock. Jamaica is mountainous: wind gets funnelled and rain gets wrung out over the Blue Mountains, so flash floods and landslides can kill far from the coast, while low-lying Portmore and the Kingston waterfront carry the surge risk. The Bahamas is the opposite: a low-lying archipelago where much of the land sits only a few metres above sea level, so storm surge is the main killer — Hurricane Dorian (2019) pushed roughly 6 m of water over parts of Abaco and Grand Bahama. Barbados is the easternmost island and often the first landfall of Atlantic systems, but its low relief and heavy coral-limestone construction change the picture again. Trinidad sits south of the classic hurricane belt near 10°N — rare direct hits, but Tobago is measurably more exposed, and flooding remains Trinidad’s recurring threat.
| Island | Biggest threat | Building-stock note | Who runs shelters | First move when a watch is issued |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jamaica | Flash floods, landslides, surge in Portmore/Kingston harbour | Concrete block common in towns; zinc roofing widespread in older stock | ODPEM + parish councils | Know your parish shelter list; clear drains and gullies around the house |
| Trinidad & Tobago | Street and river flooding; Tobago takes wind that Trinidad rarely sees | Concrete-frame dominant; informal hillside housing vulnerable to slips | ODPM + municipal corporations | Check ODPM advisories; do not assume “Trinidad never gets hit” |
| Barbados | First-landfall wind events; south- and west-coast marine damage | Coral-limestone masonry plus timber chattel houses that need tie-downs | Department of Emergency Management (DEM) | Secure the roof and shutters early — systems arrive with less warning time from the east |
| Bahamas | Storm surge over low-lying cays; whole-island inundation possible | Timber-frame common in Family Islands; elevation, not walls, decides survival | NEMA Bahamas | Decide evacuation early — on a 3 m elevation island, vertical evacuation may not exist |
The practical conclusion: read your island’s own met office alongside the NHC cone. The cone tells you where the centre may go; your met office tells you what that means for your coast, your river and your parish.
The Atlantic season officially runs 1 June to 30 November, with a sharp climatological peak from mid-August to mid-October. The most expensive mistake is compressing all preparation into the 48 hours before landfall, when plywood, water and batteries are sold out and the queues at the pump are hours long. Spread the work out instead — by month, it looks like this:
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| May | Service the roof (fix lifted sheets, check straps), trim trees near lines, photograph the house for insurance, review your policy’s hurricane deductible. |
| June | Season opens. Build the kit: 3+ days of water (4 L/person/day), shelf food, medication, cash in small bills, power bank, torch, first aid. Confirm your nearest official shelter. |
| July | Dry-run the plan with the household: who grabs what, where documents live (waterproof bag), how you regroup if phones die. Top up phone credit habits. |
| Aug–Sep (peak) | Check the NHC Tropical Weather Outlook every morning. Keep vehicle tanks above half. Refresh water stocks. Never let the kit be “borrowed empty”. |
| October | Stay alert — late-season storms form closer to home (western Caribbean) and give less lead time than long-track Cape Verde systems. |
| November | Season closes on the 30th. Do a debrief: what ran out, what was useless, what to change. Store the kit dry — it is next year’s head start. |
Remittances are a pillar of Caribbean economies — for Jamaica they are worth several billion US dollars a year, much of it from the diaspora corridors in the US, UK and Canada. The advertised “fee” is only part of what you pay. Most providers also take an exchange-rate margin: they convert your dollars at a rate worse than the mid-market rate and keep the difference. A transfer advertised as “$4.99 fee” can quietly cost 5–7% once that margin is counted. The honest math is: take what the recipient actually gets in local currency, compare it with what the mid-market rate would have given, and express the shortfall as a percentage of the amount sent. That is exactly what the calculator in the MONEY tab does. As a benchmark, the UN Sustainable Development Goal target for remittance cost is 3% — many Caribbean corridors still run well above it, so comparing two providers before every large transfer is worth real money.
The four currencies on this panel behave very differently, and knowing which kind you hold changes how you read any rate. The Bahamian dollar (BSD) is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, and the Barbadian dollar (BBD) is pegged at 2:1 — those rates essentially do not move, so if a money-transfer provider quotes you a “special rate” of, say, 1.92 BBD per USD, the 4% gap is their margin, in plain sight. The Trinidad & Tobago dollar (TTD) is a managed float that has stayed near 6.8 per USD for years, though access to US dollars at that official rate can be limited. The Jamaican dollar (JMD) floats and genuinely moves week to week, which is why Jamaicans watch the rate the way other islands watch the weather. Rule of thumb: for pegged currencies, judge a provider by its fee; for the JMD, judge it by the rate.
Utilities across the region — JPS in Jamaica, T&TEC in Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados Light & Power, and BPL in the Bahamas — restore power in roughly the same order, and it is not first-come-first-served. First come the generating stations and transmission lines, because nothing downstream works without them. Then substations, then feeders serving critical infrastructure — hospitals, water pumping stations, airports, emergency services. Next are the main feeders that bring back thousands of customers per repair, then smaller lateral lines, and only at the very end individual service drops — the single span from the pole to one house. If your neighbours have light and you do not, you are probably in that last category, and you should report it specifically, because the utility may believe your area is already restored. One rule outranks all of this: treat every downed line as live. Lines can be re-energised remotely without warning, and standing water can carry current metres from the wire.
The Caribbean Examinations Council releases CSEC and CAPE results through its official student portal at results.cxc.org, usually in August for the May/June sitting. You need the credentials on your registration slip — candidate number, plus the details your school or ministry provides. Two things to know. First, the official check is free: any site or WhatsApp contact charging to “unlock” results early is a scam, and look-alike domains appear every results season. Second, your school and the ministry receive the same data, so if the portal is overloaded on results morning (it usually is), waiting a few hours costs you nothing. One regional wrinkle: the Bahamas does not sit CXC — Bahamian students take BJC and BGCSE examinations run by the Ministry of Education in Nassau, with results distributed through schools and the ministry rather than a public portal. Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and Barbados all use CXC.
Every island keeps its high-stakes paperwork behind a handful of official portals, and knowing the real domain is half the battle against phishing. In Jamaica: PICA for passports, Tax Administration Jamaica for TRN, property tax and driver’s licence payments. In Trinidad & Tobago: the Immigration Division for passports, the Inland Revenue Division for BIR numbers and e-Tax, and the Ministry of Works’ Licensing Division for permits. In Barbados: the Immigration Department for passports and the Barbados Revenue Authority, which unusually handles both taxes and driver’s licensing. In the Bahamas: the Passport Office under the Department of Immigration, the Department of Inland Revenue for business licences and VAT, and the Road Traffic Department for licences. The STATUS tab lists all of these with one-line explanations of what each portal actually does — no logins, no lookups, just the verified front doors.
The STORM tab shows live conditions and a 3-day outlook for your capital — Kingston, Port of Spain, Bridgetown or Nassau — using the free Open-Meteo forecast and marine APIs. Three numbers do most of the work. Sustained wind is what the Saffir-Simpson categories are built on; compare it with the table above. Gusts run 20–40% higher than sustained wind and are what actually removes loose roof sheets, so treat the gust figure as your “what will break” number. Daily rain totals matter more than intensity on mountainous islands — 200 mm falling on saturated Jamaican hillsides is a landslide setup regardless of wind. The marine line adds maximum wave height, which fishers and coastal households can read as an early surge proxy. These are model forecasts, not warnings: when a system is inside the NHC cone, official advisories and your met office override anything a forecast model shows here.
Yes, it is completely free, and it currently shows no advertising. There are no accounts and no server-side storage — your country choice and preferences live only in your browser’s localStorage.
Rates come from open.er-api.com, which publishes mid-market reference rates updated roughly once a day. They are for orientation — the rate a bank, cambio or remittance provider offers you will differ, and that difference is exactly what the remittance calculator measures.
Prepare your household to ride out a Category 1–2 (water, food, cash, secured roof) and plan to evacuate or shelter for anything Category 3 and above. Surge and rain kill more people than wind, so a low category with a slow, wet track can be worse than the number suggests.
Utilities restore in order of impact: generation and transmission first, then substations, hospitals and water plants, then the biggest feeders. A single service drop to one house is the smallest possible repair, so it is scheduled last — report it specifically so the utility knows your street is still dark.
CSEC and CAPE results are released free on the official portal at results.cxc.org using your candidate credentials. The Bahamas does not sit CXC — students there take BJC and BGCSE exams administered by the Ministry of Education, with results issued through schools.
Yes. The Bahamian dollar is pegged 1:1 and the Barbadian dollar at 2:1 to the US dollar, and both pegs have held for decades. Any provider quoting you a noticeably worse rate on a pegged currency is charging a hidden margin, not reflecting the market.
Power users: open the >_TERM tab for a hacker-style terminal — help,
cat 4 (prints the Category 4 playbook), season (prep timeline), fx,
convert 100 usd jmd, remit 200 5 150, links and more.
All figures are for information only; official sources are always authoritative.