A return home finds misery, hope in the U.S. Virgin Islands
Storms have come and gone, but not like this
St. CROIX, U.S. Virgin Islands – I first glimpse the damage to my home island from afar: A line of beaches pounded clean of sand by hurricane-driven waves. Blue tarps covering scores of roofless homes as my small commuter plane heads for a landing at the airport. Up close, it’s worse.
Stately mahogany trees, standing for generations, are uprooted in the historic harbor town of Frederiksted, where I was born. My junior high school’s windows are blown out and the grounds littered with twisted metal. The roof of my brother’s home has been torn off, his possessions exposed to the rain and the bright tropical sun.
This is my third grim homecoming to the U.S. Virgin Islands after a devastating hurricane. The first: Hurricane Hugo in September 1989, whose 140-mph winds punished St. Croix for hours, damaging or destroying more than 80% of its buildings and wiping out the electrical grid. Next came Hurricane Marilyn, which pummeled St. Thomas in September 1995.
This hurricane season, though, has been the most ferocious in modern history for this cluster of American islands in the Caribbean. Two Category 5 storms battered the territory in a single month. Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms of the century, landed first, pounding St. John and neighboring St. Thomas, the islands’ tourism and economic hub, on Sept. 6.
Hurricane Maria arrived two weeks later, lashing the southwestern corner of St. Croix before churning on its deadly path to Puerto Rico.
As I visit St. Thomas and St. Croix nearly eight weeks after the first storm, Virgin Islanders are in the grips of a long and painful recovery.
Electrical power, unreliable even
“I was just bawling. Here I was homeless … and nature had the audacity to put up this sunrise like nothing had happened.” Terence Thomas recalling his feelings after the storm
before the storm, has not been restored to most of the islands’ 105,000 residents. Critically ill patients have been evacuated from the islands’ two hospitals, which Gov. Kenneth Mapp warns will have to be rebuilt.
❚ Telephone and Internet service remain spotty. The damage to hotels is so extensive that two cruise ships serve as floating hotels on St. Thomas and St. Croix to house the throngs of off-island relief workers.
❚ Thousands of islanders, some seizing on free “mercy” flights and cruises, have left — perhaps never to return.
Virgin Islanders are Americans by birth, free to live wherever we choose in the United States. But those who remain on the islands have a hybrid existence of sorts, unable to cast ballots for the president.
Grit amid grief
On St. Thomas, Gwendolyn Rollins has no home.
Irma’s winds blew out the windows in her apartment at the Tutu High Rise public housing projects. Now living in a shelter, she picks through her old apartment on a recent afternoon, trying to salvage clothes and furniture to take into her new life — wherever that is.
Lifting some plastic sheeting that covers two couches, she says, “This is all that’s left of my living room.”
For all the devastation, Rollins was lucky. Two red candles sit where her living room windows once were. They honor a 38-year-old neighbor from the next building who was blown out of her apartment by Irma’s winds to her death, one of five Virgin Islanders killed in the storms.
But among the ruins, I also find grit, hope and a resolve to build back the islands stronger than before.
Terence Thomas, a college classmate at the University of the Virgin Islands, and his wife, Madelyn Lake-Thomas, rode out Irma at home, first in a 4-footwide closet in their St. Thomas house and later in a concrete storeroom as the hurricane ripped off chunks of the house.
The storm terrified them. The aftermath has been almost as bad. Trapped by the debris in their driveway, they slept for three nights in their car. In the weeks since, they’ve bunked with relatives, relying on a camping stove for cooking and a generator for power.
“For days after the storm, I said: ‘I can’t cry. I have to be the strong one,’ ” said Thomas, a government IT manager.
One day he sat outside his borrowed apartment, watching the sun rise, and lost control of his emotions. “I was just bawling,” he said. “Here I was homeless … and nature had the audacity to put up this sunrise like nothing had happened.”
But like many of the islanders I spend time with, Thomas has no intention of ever leaving:
“If all of us leave, what’s here for subsequent generations?”
Dark memories of Hugo
Living on tiny islands nearly 2,000 miles away from the U.S. mainland, Virgin Islanders have always known hardship.
My mother, whose family line on St. Croix extends back before the Americans bought these islands from Denmark 100 years ago, grew up poor in two-room house with her grandparents and three older sisters. Her grandfather helped feed the family by digging graves and making bootleg liquor.
Even during my childhood in the
1970s, flashlights and kerosene lanterns stood at the ready for the frequent and sudden losses of electricity.
But Hurricane Hugo, then the strongest storm to hit the island in more than
60 years, set a new benchmark for misery among Crucians.
Electricity disappeared for months, along with running water. Reports about the damage and the looting of businesses that followed Hugo crippled the local economy, which relies on tourism for more than half of its gross domestic product.
I was a young newspaper reporter and on vacation in the States when Hugo slammed St. Croix in September 1989. I returned a week later to a community blasted back to the primitive conditions of my mother’s generation. With no power, there’s no way to pump drinking, bathing and cooking water from the cisterns under most homes.
To bathe, my boyfriend (now husband) and I scooped buckets of water from the cistern of his family’s roofless home, taking cold, open-air “showers.”
When I return after Maria to my old neighborhood on the hard-hit outskirts of Frederiksted, the streets are narrowed by piles of debris. But I find the roof of my childhood home intact.
Not far away, however, my eldest brother Wilfred’s house is almost unrecognizable after Maria ripped off the roof he replaced following Hugo.
He had sheltered with friends elsewhere on the island during Maria. When he returned to see the wreckage, “I was shocked, angry and disappointed,” he tells me on the phone from Florida, where he is staying with relatives. “I broke down and cried when I realized that I had to do this all over again.”
Every day’s a struggle
For those who remain on the islands, navigating daily life is a chore.
The fierce winds blew down all the traffic signals. Most intersections were unmanned during my visit. Power poles hang precariously over the roadways. The ground is so saturated that every fresh downpour floods the roads. The mosquito population is booming. On a Monday morning on St. Thomas, I meet Camille McKayle Stolz, the provost at my alma mater, which sustained damage but has reopened for classes.
Her house is mostly gone. The fam- ily’s Mason & Hamlin baby grand piano sits ruined in the open air, the only thing that remains from their top floor.
The family is staying in a borrowed house nearby but have returned for cleanup.
“Your life at work, your life at home, your life at the supermarket. Everything is compromised,” McKayle Stolz says. “Your refrigerator isn’t a refrigerator any more. It’s more of a cooler.”
Hometown heroes
In the weeks after the storms, help has come from afar — and not just from the federal government.
Tim Duncan, the retired San Antonio Spurs basketball star who grew up on St. Croix, has raised more than $2.7 million. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has aides with Hurricane Sandy expertise on the ground, advising local government officials.
But Virgin Islanders have helped themselves, too.
Imani Daniel, 25, who grew up on St. Thomas and returned three years ago after college, has become one of the everyday heroes of the storm.
After discovering diabetic seniors trapped without power and no way to keep their insulin cold, she has become a personal ice-delivery service for dozens of elderly on St. Thomas after Irma.
Her friend Tyrone Reid, a martial arts instructor and a sometimes college student, has made helping the elderly one of his missions. I accompany him one morning as makes his way around St. Thomas, delivering water and Clorox wipes to three nursing homes.
The storms have changed him as much as they have changed the island. “I was super-depressed, working in dead-end retail,” Reid said. “Now, I’m trying to save the world.”
Signs of life
For all the difficulty islanders face after these storms, post-hurricane life here does not resemble the large-scale crisis unfolding in nearby Puerto Rico, an island of 3.4 million. Supermarkets are open in the Virgin Islands. Christiansted, the town tucked into a hilly basin on the northeast side of St. Croix, escaped serious damage.
Our Caribbean culture, which tries to keep grief at bay with humor, is unchanged. One T-shirt I spy uses the “I” in Irma to give the storm the middle finger. And in our tight-knit community, many of us are related. Even the governor and I are distant cousins.
While San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz wages Twitter wars with President Trump over his administration’s response to the storm in Puerto Rico, Mapp, the Virgin Islands governor, tells me he’s “very pleased with the federal response.”
More than 500 utility workers from the mainland descended in late October, racing to string power lines to meet Mapp’s goal of restoring power to 90% of the islands by Christmas.
A visit by a bipartisan congressional delegation brings promises to rebuild the island “to a better standard.” To Mapp, that includes putting more electrical transmission lines underground and hurricane-proofing critical government buildings. Eight schools on St. Croix were so damaged that they could not reopen on Oct. 23, when classes resumed. Students have doubled up in the remaining schools, attending classes in four-hour shifts.
A $36.5 billion disaster aid bill recently signed by Trump is expected to send $800 million in low-interest loans to help the territory cover operating expenses. Mapp also has estimated he will need roughly $5.5 billion from the feds for the recovery.
A deep financial hole
The territory needs all the financial help it can get.
The Virgin Islands government owes more than $2 billion to bondholders and creditors; that means the tiny territory has the highest per capita debt of any state or U.S. territory. At times this year, the government had only a few days of operating cash on hand. Mapp insists the government is not in any danger of defaulting on its bonds. Officials are encouraging tourists to return, pointing to the quick recovery of the island’s natural environment. The first cruise ships are set to arrive this month.
But it’s the storms themselves that may pull the islands from the financial brink.
For the next three to five years, “the main economic driver for the territory will be its recovery,” Mapp says.
At The Fred, a 22-room hotel on the Frederiksted waterfront, co-owner Topher Swanson is counting on that.
The grand opening for The Fred, billed as the first new hotel to open on St. Croix in 30 years, was scheduled for Dec. 1, but Maria scrambled those plans. The buildings survived, but the storm surge sent a mix of seawater, coral and stones through the property.
But Swanson, who moved to St. Croix three years ago after decades of developing high-end real estate in troubled neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., is unfazed. He plans to open his doors to relief workers as soon as possible.
Swanson reasons St. Croix is due for a string of good luck. Hurricanes “only happen every 10 or 15 years, and we’ve already had two,” he says. “So, we should be golden for 10 more years, at least.”
There’s a big part of me that wishes I could share in his magical thinking about hurricanes. After all, his hotel sits at the geographic heart of some of my life’s most important moments: I was born a block away and got married about a half-mile down the beach in the golden light of a St. Croix sunset.
But I lost my innocence about hurricanes four storms ago. And the week I spend on the islands reminds of what I already know: that one September day in the tropics can smash everything.