Disaster struck Virgin Islands, too — twice
Hurricanes Irma and Maria both hit the U.S. Virgin Islands in September as rare Category 5 storms, but the devastation there has been largely overshadowed by the damage and death this year’s hurricane season left behind in Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean nations.
The U.S. Virgin Islands were as hard-hit as any place in the country; in a territory with just 103,000 residents, more than 33,000 individuals and families have applied for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and government agencies reported Thursday that 73 percent of customers still had no power. The storms so denuded the islands’ lush vegetation that where they once showed up in satellite photos as green jewels in the sea, they were brown after the hurricanes passed.
Gov. Kenneth E. Mapp said Thursday at a news conference that he would go to Washington next week to request $7 billion in aid. After taking a group of senators on a tour of the destruction, he said in a statement earlier this week, “It is so critical that Congress sees firsthand the challenges we face in rebuilding our infrastructure.”
More than two months after the disaster began, many residents are still grappling with daily survival; serious rebuilding remains. To see how different corners of the islands are faring, The New York Times checked back on some spots that it visited and photographed not long after the storms.
For two months, Kimmeiqua Mahoney, her husband, Shawn Mathurin, and their three children tried to tough it out in their waterlogged apartment on St. Thomas, without electricity, trying in vain to keep things clean. But they gave up and moved this week to a home where the power is on.
Mahoney, 25, was eight months pregnant when Irma ripped away their doors and windows, allowing the blast of rain into their old apartment. It was as if someone aimed a fire hose at everything inside, and left it running for hours, she said; two weeks later, Maria turned the hose on again.
They have replaced or boarded over the openings, but the walls inside are “still wet to the touch,” she said. “The bathroom roof is falling apart. There’s a lot of mold, greenish and bluish, coming out of the walls.”
Nearly everything they owned was ruined. An outer wall of their apartment, in a building in the Tutu High Rise Community, shifted in one of the storms, so the rooms flood anew with each rainfall. Their only way to cook was on a campfire, and with no refrigeration, they had to be careful to buy only as much food as they could prepare and eat each day. Across the islands, mosquitoes and flies proliferate in the standing water and rotting garbage, and like many people, Mahoney, unable to close her home to the elements, worries about a disease outbreak.
Now, she has an added worry, an infant to care for — Trinity Luisa Mathurin, born in a hospital Oct. 19.
The baby’s arrival helped persuade the parents that they had to move, Mahoney said, “because it’s not sanitary.”
The storms hit Cibone, a restaurant in the historic district of Frederiksted, on St. Croix, so hard that the owners, Almitra and Gregory Richards, have not even been able to assess the damage.
“The landlord has workers in there making sure it’s structurally sound,” Almitra Richards said. “Until then, we can’t even get in to see if the equipment is OK and start serious cleanup. I think we can scrub down the furniture and salvage it, but we don’t really know yet.”