In British Virgin Islands, residents band together for survival
JOST VAN DYKE — This little island draws boats from all around the globe to its powdery beaches and ebullient bar scene. Thousands of visitors come for the boisterous New Year’s Eve celebration at Foxy’s — a wooden beachside bar decorated with the license plates and flags that visitors have left behind since the 1960s.
But after Hurricane Irma’s winds annihilated many of the homes here on Jost Van Dyke, one of the British Virgin Islands, Foxy’s Tamarind Bar and Restaurant has become something else entirely: the island’s de facto command center and lifeline.
Without electricity, running water or telephone lines, the island’s 298 inhabitants have been marooned, forced to survive with what they salvaged: a satellite phone, a chain saw, a week’s worth of food. There is little to no government presence on the ground, but there is Foxy’s — which has some of the island’s only generators. Beneath the bar’s tattered roof, residents ration supplies and cook meals twice a day for most of the island.
“Anyone that comes, we feed,” said Tom Warner, the bar’s general manager. A week after Hurricane Irma roared through the Caribbean, leaving more than two dozen dead, residents of the British Virgin Islands vowed resilience, taking it upon themselves to restore some sense of normalcy in the battered archipelago.
Many residents said the British government in London, which oversees the islands, has been sluggish to attend to their dire situation, so residents have had to band together.
“We’re an isolated territory,” said Christine Perakis, a resident of Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands. Jost Van Dyke, the smallest, was ravaged almost beyond recognition.
Green hillsides have been replaced with a brownish landscape of bare tree trunks and white debris. Sydney’s Peace and Love, a bar popular for its lobster, was smashed to rubble by a ferry thrown onto the beach.
The Philippine government has finalyzed arrangements for the repatriation of 140 Filipinos living in the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and Sint Maarten affected by Hurricane Irma on the Caribbean islands. The Filipinos are now in San Juan, Puerto Rico and will take a chartered flight to the Philippines next week. — Pia Lee-Brago