Irma leaves trail of death and destruction
At least 14 dead as hurricane devastates islands in the Caribbean
Apocalyptic scenes of flattened buildings and ruined airports emerged from once- lush Caribbean i slands 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 at least 14, a figure expected to rise as its punishing winds hit Hispaniola and moved closer to a potentially disastrous assault on Cuba and Florida. Islands ripped apart by its Category 5- force winds were left with little time to regroup. The deaths were reported on the US Virgin Islands, Barbuda and St Martin.
The National Hurricane Centre warned that Jose was churning toward the Leeward Islands, expected to threaten them as a major hurricane by tomorrow.
“We are very worried about Hurricane Jose,” Browne said yesterday in a phone interview, 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 yesterday, the scene of residents flocking onto 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 by telephone.
Ryan’s family business, Tropical Adventures Antigua, dispatched a 23m motorboat to ferry people off the island before Hurricane Jose arrived. Phone and internet communications are down on Barbuda, he said, and some residents remain stuck in isolated areas blocked by impassable roads.
“We really are in a rush against time,” Ryan said.
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 lawn mower from the sky has gone over the island,” Marilou Rohan, a European vacationer 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. I am lucky that I was in a sturdy house, but we had to bolster the door, the wind was so hard.”
Occasionally, soldiers have passed by, but they were doing little to impose order, Rohan said.
“People feel powerless. They do not know what to do. You see the fear in their eyes,” she said.
The United States and European countries scrambled to send ships and aid to the battered Caribbean islands. The Pentagon deployed three Navy ships, nearly two dozen aircraft and hundreds of Marines to the isolated US Virgin Islands, where they were needed to relocate hospital patients and others displaced by the storm and haul in relief supplies. The US military was also bringing waterpurification systems and tools to clear roadways choked with storm debris.
French Foreign Minister Gerard Collomb said that “even the strongest buildings are destroyed” on the French side of St Martin.
In the US Virgin Islands, authorities described “catastrophic” damage, the associated Press reported.
In Puerto Rico, residents were relieved that the storm did not leave a trail of death. Still, Irma knocked out nearly half of the 1600 cellphone towers on the financially strained island, leaving many residents without service, local media reported. More than 1 million people lost power. The i sland’s power authority had warned before the storm that damage could leave some neighbourhoods without electricity for up to six months because of precarious infrastructure.
In the Dominican Republic, which shares Hispaniola with impoverished Haiti, the civil defence director, General Rafael Carrasco, said more than 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 in Bavaro, Puerto Plata and Samana to the capital, Santo Domingo.
Yesterday, 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. That storm, bearing Category 4 force when it made landfall on October 4 along Haiti’s southwest coast, killed more than 500 people on the island and injured more than 400 others.
Although the nation of 11 million appeared to avoid a direct hit, authorities and aid groups warned that the storm’s glancing blow was already flooding highways and bridges, bringing mudslides and toppling rickety housing.
The Government ordered schools closed and warned citizens to leave work early to prepare for the storm. Concern centred on the flood- prone north, where Irma’s torrential rain brought knee- deep water to the fishing and agricultural city of Fort Liberty. Mayor Louis Jacques Etienne said rising water had already drenched bedrooms and kitchens, and flooded fields of rice and plantains.
The ferocity of the storm, he said, sent many of the city’s 37,000 residents scrambling to get to last- minute shelters set up in a Catholic church, two schools and the public library.
The evacuation effort unfolding in Haiti, critics said, was happening far too late. But Etienne and national officials insisted that locals would not have heeded warnings until they saw the power of Irma firsthand.
“Look, they don’t believe you when you tell them there’s a hurricane coming,” Etienne said in a phone interview.
“They need to see it for themselves.”
Jerry Chandler, director of Haiti’s National Protection Agency, said he was working with projections that as many as 600,000 people would be severely affected by the storm, with potentially 400,000 people facing the destruction of their homes.
“It’s a slow- moving hurricane, and as it moves toward us, I’m afraid it will slow even more,” Chandler said.
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.
“It’s true that this is the biggest storm to pass here on record, and we’re just hoping the impact will not be as severe as we fear,” he said.