Macron offers islanders help, Keys residents return to devastation
Wrapping up a sweeping visit to the destroyed island of St Martin, France’s President responded to anger that his Government didn’t do enough to handle Hurricane Irma’s wrath and promised to evacuate residents of his country’s Caribbean territories and provide services and shelter for those who choose to stay.
President Emmanuel Macron outlined a plan to distribute drinking water, food and medical help using the islands’ radio stations and even megaphones, if necessary. “What we have seen today are people determined to rebuild and return to a normal life,” he said yesterday. “They are impatient for answers and some are very, very angry. The anger is legitimate because it is a result of the fear they have faced and of being very fatigued. It is certain that some want to leave, and we will help them in that effort.” Macron pledged to rebuild St Martin as a “model” for withstanding future storms.
Macron said the Category 5 hurricane killed 11 people in St Martin. Four people died on the Dutch side of the island, known as St Maarten.
The Dutch Red Cross said more than 200 people were listed as missing on St Maarten, but with communications extremely spotty a week after the storm hit, it wasn’t clear how many were simply without cell service and power and unable to let friends and family know they survived.
The organisation said 90 per cent of buildings on the Dutch territory were damaged and a third destroyed as Irma roared across the island it shares with French St Martin.
The United Nations, meanwhile, said it was airlifting food to stricken islands devastated by the hurricane in the eastern and western Caribbean.
The death toll from Irma climbed to more than five dozen yesterday. Of those, 43 were killed in the Caribbean and at least 18 in the southeastern United States.
Evacuees began returning to the storm-ravaged Florida Keys yester- day to find homes ripped apart and businesses coated in seaweed amid a debris-strewn landscape where an estimated 25 per cent of all dwellings were destroyed.
Destruction was widespread in the Keys, a resort island chain stretching southwest from the tip of the Florida Peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico and connected by a single, narrow highway and a series of bridges and causeways along a route of nearly 160km.
“I don’t have a house. I don’t have a job. I have nothing,” said Mercedes Lopez, 50, whose family fled north from the Florida Keys town of Marathon last Saturday and rode out the storm at an Orlando hotel, only to learn their home was destroyed, along with the service station where he worked. “We came here, leaving everything at home, and we go back to nothing,” Lopez said.
Some 5.8 million homes and businesses in Florida and nearby states still had no power yesterday as utility companies scrambled to get the lights back on in one of the biggest power restoration efforts in US history.