After the hurricane

To The Daily Telegraph

The initial British aid effort in the wake of Hurricane Irma has been described as pathetic, disgraceful and lacking in vision, compared with those of the French and the Dutch. This is arrant nonsense.

The British have no military bases in the Caribbean, while the French have a 1,000-man garrison on Martinique, and the Dutch have a permanent naval base on Curaçao.

The French and the Dutch between them had but two islands to worry about, separated by 22 miles. The British had four Overseas Territories, a total of 25 inhabited islands from Montserrat to the Turks and Caicos, some 750 miles apart.

It was not until 3 or 4 September that the likely path of the hurricane was known. It made landfall at 2am on Wednesday 6 September. The first ship to reach the area – a Dutch patrol vessel – arrived on Thursday afternoon, followed by a small Dutch logistics vessel, of limited utility, late that evening.

About ten hours later, early on Friday morning, the British RFA Mounts Bay reached Anguilla. Three times the size of the Dutch ship, it landed engineers, supplies and heavy plant (something neither the French nor Dutch had managed), and within hours they had cleared the airport runway, fixed the roof and the power to the hospital, and stopped a dangerous fuel leak at the main petrol dump.

They then set off for the British Virgin Islands, six hours away. Also on Friday, three transport aircraft, filled with personnel and supplies, left Britain.

Nick Downie, South Africa