Islands face second battering
HAITI: Apocalyptic scenes of flattened buildings and ruined airports emerged from once-lush Caribbean islands devastated by Hurricane Irma as the deadly storm began to lash vulnerable Haiti yesterday and another powerful storm, Hurricane Jose, followed fast in its wake.
About 95 per cent of the tiny island of Barbuda sustained damage, according to Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda. Ghastly photos and videos from St Martin and St Barthelemy, also known as St Barts, showed buildings in ruin and cars and trucks almost submerged in the storm surge.
Irma’s death toll reached 14, a figure expected to rise as its punishing winds hit the island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and move closer to a potentially disastrous assault on Cuba and Florida.
Islands ripped apart by its Category 5-force winds have been left with little time to regroup. The United States National Hurricane Centre warned that Jose was churning towards the Leeward Islands and was expected to threaten them as a major hurricane by tomorrow.
‘‘We are very worried about Hurricane Jose,’’ Browne said, adding that Irma had left about 60 per cent of Barbuda’s nearly 2000 residents homeless.
When Craig Ryan, a 29-year-old tourism entrepreneur who lives in Antigua, reached Barbuda by boat, the scene of residents flocking on to the beach seeking help struck him as a ‘‘Caribbean version of Dunkirk’’, the famous evacuation of Allied troops from a French coastal city during World War II.
‘‘It’s such a level of devastation that you can’t even see structures standing,’’ he said.
Ryan’s family business has sent a 23-metre motorboat to ferry people off Barbuda before Hurricane Jose arrives. He said phone and Internet communications were down, and some residents remained stuck in isolated areas blocked by impassable roads.
‘‘We really are in a rush against time.’’
On St Martin, there was little sense that authorities had the situation under control. Witnesses said supermarkets were being looted, with no police visible in the streets.
‘‘It’s like someone with a lawnmower from the sky has gone over the island,’’ Marilou Rohan, a European holidamaker on the Dutch side of the island, which is split with France, told the Dutch NOS news service. ‘‘Houses are destroyed. Some are razed to the ground.’’
Occasionally, soldiers passed by, but they were doing little to impose order, she said.
‘‘People feel powerless. They do not know what to do. You see the fear in their eyes.’’
The US and European countries are scrambling to send ships and aid to the battered islands.
The Pentagon has deployed three navy ships, nearly two dozen aircraft and hundreds of Marines to the isolated US Virgin Islands, where they are needed to relocate hospital patients and others displaced by the storm and bring in relief supplies.
The US military is also bringing water purification systems and equipment to clear roads choked with storm debris.
French Foreign Minister Gerard Collomb said that ‘‘even the strongest buildings are destroyed’’ on the French side of St Martin, while French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said four people had been found dead there.
In addition, four people were reported killed on the US Virgin Islands, according to authorities there who described ‘‘catastrophic’’ damage. There was at least one death reported on the British island of Anguilla, another on Barbuda and one on the Dutch part of St Martin.
In Puerto Rico, residents expressed relief that the storm killed only three people. Still, Irma knocked out nearly half of the island’s 1600 cellphone towers, and more than 1 million people lost power.
In the Dominican Republic, the civil defense director, General Rafael Carrasco, said at least 2700 homes had been damaged. The government said nearly 7000 people had been evacuated from their homes, and 7400 tourists had been moved from beachside hotels to the capital, Santo Domingo.
As night began to fall, the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean was punishing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere - Haiti, a nation still recovering from a massive 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew last October.
Although the nation of 11 million appeared to avoid a direct hit, authorities and aid groups warned that the storm’s glancing blow was flooding highways and bridges, causing mudslides and toppling rickety housing.
Concern centered on the floodprone north, where Irma’s torrential rain brought knee-deep water to the fishing and agricultural city of Fort Liberty. Mayor Louis Jacques Etienne said the ferocity of the storm had sent many of the city’s 37,000 residents scrambling to get to last-minute shelters.
United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups said they were in northern Haiti, poised to distribute medical and food aid to affected communities as soon as the storm allowed. Marc Vincent, resident coordinator for the UN in Haiti, said one positive sign was that the storm appeared be tracking slightly farther north than anticipated.
- Washington Post