Tiny Island of Dominica faces new climate reality after Hurricane David
ROSEAU, Dominica: McCarthy Marie has been living in the Fond Cani community, a few kilometres east of the Dominica capital Roseau, for 38 years. The 68-year- old economist moved to the area in 1979 following the decimation of the island by Hurricane David.
But even though David was such a destructive hurricane, Marie told IPS that when Hurricane Maria hit the island in September, islanders witnessed something they had never seen before.
“How many of the countries that continue to pollute the planet had to suffer a loss of 224 per cent of their GDP this year?” – Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit
“The entire city of Roseau was completely flooded,” Marie told IPS.
“There is a major river flowing through the centre of the city. The river rose pretty quickly and that was compounded by the fact that we have five bridges crossing the river and a couple of those bridges, especially those we built more recently, were defi nitely built too low so they presented a barrier to the river and prevented the water from flowing into the sea as it would otherwise have done.”
Hurricane Maria, a category five storm with sustained winds reaching 180 miles an hour, battered the Caribbean nation for several hours between Sept 18 to Sept 19.
It left 27 people dead and as many missing, and nearly 90 per cent of the structures on the island damaged or destroyed.
Marie said Dominicans have been talking a lot about climate change for quite some time, but the island was not fully prepared for its impacts.
And while Dominicans in general have not been building with monster hurricanes like Maria in mind, Marie said he took an extra- ordinary step following his experience with Hurricane David.
“I prepared for hurricanes by building my hurricane bunker in 1989 when I built my house. When the storm ( Maria) started to get serious, we went into the bunker and we stayed there for the duration of the storm,” he said. — IPS