‘Like having a bomb literally thrown on a city’
As Hurricane Irma pulverized the tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda, desperate families tried to hide their children in cupboards and prayed for deliverance as the walls and roofs of their homes flew away piece by piece.
The aftermath looked like a bomb had gone off, with swaths of buildings reduced to rubble, and survivors told how their lives were destroyed as they were pounded by the full force of Irma’s 300 km/h winds.
“I’ve lost everything,” said Gloria Cethaf, a mother of six, in tears. “My home has been torn apart. Everything is gone. This is not my first hurricane but it’s the worst I’ve ever experienced.
“The kitchen came apart, then the roof came off, and we had to spend the night outside in the wilderness. We called out but no one heard us. We need to get off this island. Everyone is homeless, we don’t have anything to ride out the next storm.”
At the island’s airport the roof had come down and the area was littered with mangled debris.
With the majority of the 1,600 islanders homeless many gathered in pouring rain at the airport hoping to get to Antigua. One woman screamed: “There should be a mandatory evacuation.”
A sand barrier had been breached leaving part of the island under water, and a luxury resort had been devastated. Vegetation was charred suggesting a fire broke out as the hurricane hit.
As rescue workers arrived they warned debris would become flying missiles if Barbuda is hit by Hurricane Jose, which is following in Irma’s wake.
Jacqueline Beazer, a Barbudan, said: “It was devastating. I was at my parents house and the back door blew in, so we ran to the community centre, which was a shelter, and it was packed.
“Then the community centre was destroyed so I went to my friend’s house but it was completely gone. My business, my bakery, gone. It’s too much to handle.”
Another woman, holding a baby boy, said: “It was chaos. Really awful. When I came outside afterwards and saw people were alive I said ‘Thank you Jesus!’”
“It was like a horror movie,” added another Barbudan woman. “People were running from house to house, and we had cars flying over our heads.
“We had 40-foot containers flying left and right, people were tying themselves to their roofs with ropes to keep them down.”
In the aftermath the island was cut off from the world as its communications systems went down. “It’s a black hole,” said one rescue worker.
Around 90 per cent of the buildings were damaged, according to Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda.
He added: “Barbuda now is literally rubble. It’s absolute devastation. The island is literally under water. As it stands now, Barbuda is barely habitable. This is like having a bomb literally thrown on a city.”
A two-year-old child was confirmed dead on the island having perished as a family tried to escape the onslaught. But there was also the missing.
The family of two British sisters who were on the island, Afiya Frank, 27, and Asha, 29, were said to be “out of their minds” with worry because they had not heard from them.
Barbuda was only the first island to be hammered as Irma left at least 13 dead on its devastating march west.
At Robert De Niro’s beachfront home on the island the hurricane had ripped off the roof and the Hollywood actor’s retreat was surrounded by water and debris.
The luxury Cocoa Point resort, surrounded by kilometres of pink and white sand beaches, had most of its 400 palm trees knocked over.
A power station was also flattened and power lines were down.
The winds were so strong they stripped trees and the ocean came flooding in turning streets into rivers and blocking them with debris.
Also ravaged was St. Barts, a playground for the rich and famous including Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and Tom Hanks.
In Puerto Rico more than half the population of three million were left without power, and rivers broke their banks in the centre and north of the island.
Holidaymakers there were forced to sleep on mattresses in the theatre building of a hotel. Three U.S. Navy ships were anchored off the coast to help.
One of the worst affected areas was St. Martin where huge shipping containers were tossed around like matchsticks, boats were hurled on to land, trees ripped up, and roofs destroyed.
Its Princess Juliana Airport, and the harbour, suffered destruction and mobile telephone and electricity networks were knocked out.
It was not immediately known whether Le Chateau des Palmiers, President Donald Trump’s US$17 million retreat in St. Martin, had sustained damage.
Rene H. Lepine, a Quebec man living on Saint Martin, said, “It was the most terrifying experience of my life, to put it mildly. You realize how powerless you are to circumstances and, other than having prepared yourself for the event, that’s all you can do.
“This thing was of epic proportions and it was just totally overwhelming.”
He took shelter at a brother-in-law’s home, surrounded by cliffs, with no breeze or view of the ocean.
“Well, that’s what actually saved us,” he said. “We were under the wind and we survived it here.”
The winds blew the roof off his home.
“You have to realize once the roof was gone, we got 40 inches (100 centimetres) of rain,” Lepine said.
Paul de Windt, one of 80,000 people on the island, said: “Lots of people are just wandering around aimlessly as they have no homes any more and don’t know what to do.”
Daniel Gibbs, a local official, said: “It’s an enormous catastrophe, 95 per cent of the island is destroyed.”
St. Martin has Dutch and French sections. The Dutch Navy sent two ships and France said 100,000 packages of combat rations were en route, along with 200 French troops and medics, and a transport plane. French President Emmanuel Macron was to go to the region “as soon as possible”.
Josephine Gumbs-Conner, a lawyer from the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, home to 13,000 people, criticized what she called a “pathetic” response by the U.K.
She said: “Anguilla is utterly devastated. When you look at our island at the moment you would think that it just suffered nuclear bomb devastation.
“I am truly disappointed. I anticipated that given our relationship with the U.K. they would have done like our French neighbours on St. Martin who made sure they had military on the ground so the response given is timely, effective and helpful for people. That is sorely lacking in this case.”
On St. Thomas in the nearby U.S. Virgin Islands, Laura Strickling spent 12 hours hunkered down with her husband and one-yearold daughter in a boardedup basement apartment with no power as the storm raged outside. They emerged to find the lush island in tatters. Many of their neighbours’ homes were damaged and once-dense vegetation was largely gone.
“There are no leaves. It is crazy. One of the things we loved about St. Thomas is that it was so green. And it’s gone,” Strickling said. “It will take years for this community to get back on its feet.”
BARBUDA NOW IS LITERALLY RUBBLE. IT’S ABSOLUTE DEVASTATION ... BARELY HABITABLE.