Paradise Lost - where once there was an island called Barbuda

Once there was an island known as Barbuda. After Hurricane Irma, much of it is gone

LATimes,

7 September, 2017

Hurricane Irma decimated the small Caribbean island of Barbuda, ripping apart buildings, uprooting trees and killing at least one person as its 185 mph winds swept across the two-island nation best known for its pristine sandy beaches.

And now Hurricane Jose is apparently about to deliver another big blow.

“We just received a report that Jose should hit Barbuda directly,” Roderick Faustin, first secretary for the Embassy of Antigua and Barbuda in Washington said in an email to The Times on Thursday. “So we may have to evacuate the island.”

According to the National Hurricane Center, Jose was a Category 3 hurricane packing 120 mph winds. Forecasts show it may veer away from Puerto Rico, east of the Bahamas and across open water toward Bermuda.

In an earlier interview Thursday, Faustin told The Times that Irma had caused heavy damage on the tiny island.

“Barbuda is totally destroyed,” he said. “At least 95% of the properties in Barbuda are either totally destroyed or damaged.”

The schools, single hospital and airport, and two hotels on the island of 68 square miles were either damaged or lay in ruins, Faustin said. There is no running water, and telephone service is out after the communications tower was literally snapped in half.

“Hurricane Irma would have been easily the most powerful hurricane to have stormed through the Caribbean, and unfortunately Barbuda was in its path,” a grim-faced Prime Minister Gaston Browne told ABS TV in Antigua on Wednesday after flying over Barbuda. The island of 1,800 to 2,000 people was “barely habitable,” he said.

“It was heart-wrenching, absolutely devastating,” Browne later told CNN. “I have never seen any such destruction.”

Officials said a child was killed as its mother was trying to evacuate a damaged property.

“But when you look at the extent of the devastation, I’m surprised that we did not have any more fatalities,” Browne said. “That in itself would have come from … a high level of preparedness. But the monstrosity that this storm was, anything that would have been in its path evidently would have suffered the wrath of that storm.”

Browne told ABS that “on a per capita basis, the extent of the destruction on Barbuda is unprecedented.” He put the preliminary estimated price tag to rebuild the island at $100 million.

But “that’s conservative because we’re talking about rebuilding everything, all its institutions, the infrastructure for telecommunications, the roads … ,” Browne said. “It is terrible.”

Residents took to social media with expressions of relief and gratitude.

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Barbuda resident on @abstvradio just now: "I'm thankful to be alive. We had minimum loss of life but maximum loss of property" | Via @blkahn

“I’m thankful to be alive,” Omar Alfonso tweeted. “We had minimum loss of life but maximum loss of property.”

Barbuda resident on @abstvradio just now: "I'm thankful to be alive. We had minimum loss of life but maximum loss of property" | Via @blkahn

Faustin, the embassy official, said what was most immediately needed was “drinking water, medicine, food, the basic necessities,” he said.

With the runway of Barbuda’s airport damaged, neighboring Antigua will be used as a hub from which helicopters and boats would depart to ferry relief supplies to Barbuda, officials said.

Faustin said the government was mobilizing private citizens with vessels to carry food, drinking water, medical supplies and other materials to Barbuda. The country’s defense force already had been deployed to help restore communications and other infrastructure.

“We are also looking to evacuate those residents who are injured or sick and elderly to Antigua,” Faustin said. It was unclear how many people that would entail, he said.

Others residents, who took shelter by the scores in the few municipal structures and other sturdy buildings that survived, also could need to leave the island soon, officials said.

Michael Joseph, president of the Red Cross in Antigua and Barbuda, told CNN on Thursday that “the decision has been made already that if this continues, there’ll be full evacuation of all persons in Barbuda.”

Despite the scale of the disaster, Faustin said the people of the twin-island nation remained resolute in the face of what lies ahead.

“Hurricanes are nothing new to us,” he said. “We do our best. We prepare ourselves to survive and rebuild. We are resilient people. We have encountered a lot, and we are prepared to repair, rebuild the island and move on.”

PARADISE LOST – PM Gaston Browne Says Full Evacuation Of Barbuda Might Be Necessary

By Desmond Brown – Executive Editor

Antigua News Room,

6 September, 2017

The tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda is best known for its pink sand beaches. In July 2011, Barbuda renamed a three-mile stretch of beach after the late Princess Diana of Wales, who was a frequent visitor.

But another visitor which showed up in the wee hours of Wednesday, September 6, has decimated what was once regarded as paradise, where the rich and famous like Australian billionaire investor James Packer and movie actor Robert DeNiro plan to build a US $250 million resort project.

A powerful Hurricane Irma, churned its way across the tiny island, leaving at least one person dead and millions of dollars in damages. An infant was killed during the monster hurricane, according to Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne.

“I journeyed to Barbuda this afternoon and what I saw was heart-wrenching, absolutely devastating,” Browne said on state-owned television.

“In fact, I believe that on a per capita basis, the extent of the destruction in Barbuda is unprecedented. And it is unprecedented based on the type of storm. Hurricane Irma would have been easily the most powerful hurricane to have stormed through the Caribbean and it is extremely unfortunate that Barbuda was right in its path.”

When Irma’s core slammed into Barbuda, its maximum sustained winds were 185-mph, well above the 157-mph threshold of a Category 5 storm.

Browne estimates the damage on Barbuda, where he says 1,800 people live, to be about $150 million.

“What is instructive is that a difference of 30 to 50 miles involving a hurricane could make a major difference because whereas we [Antigua] may have had wind strengths up to about 130 miles per hour, Barbuda evidently would have had 180 – 185 miles per hour and that has made a fundamental difference,” Browne explained.

“From my observation, having done an aerial survey, I would say that about 95 percent of the properties would have suffered some level of damage, they would have lost at least a part of their roofs, some have lost whole roofs, some properties have been totally demolished, it is absolutely heart-wrenching#.

The storm is one of three hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, the first time since 2010 that three active hurricanes have been in the Atlantic, according to reports. This is very troubling for Prime Minister Browne.

“In fact, you know that we are threatened now by yet another storm, Hurricane Jose, and if that is the case and it’s coming our way then clearly we would have to evacuate the residents of Barbuda. In fact, I am of the view that as it stands now Barbuda is barely habitable and if we have yet another storm coming in a matter of days we will have to make special arrangements to evacuate all Barbudans and bring them over here [Antigua] until we can restore some level of normalcy,” he said.

Residents have been worried about a prediction that most of Barbuda will be under water by 2050 with local scientists previously warning the tiny 62-square-mile island is becoming one of the most vulnerable spots on earth to the consequences of climate change.

“We are small, we are flat…and if the climate change predictions come true, especially with respect to sea level rise, you are looking at potentially a third of the island being not available for the sort of things we are using it for right now,” marine biologist John Mussington once said.

Browne explained that “the island is literally under water” noting “that, in itself, represents a serious threat in terms of mosquito-borne diseases and we have to be very careful”.

Barbuda was “so badly damaged that there is no communication” from the island, said Keithley Meade, director of the meteorological office in Antigua and Barbuda.

“We have a lot of broken trees across the island,” Meade said from Antigua, whose 80,000 people comprise most of the two-island nation’s population. Video showed a cell phone tower knocked over.

“Within the next 18 hours we intend to mobilize a significant amount of resources to send over to Barbuda to provide some temporary relief,” Prime Minister Browne said, explaining that there is only one satellite phone on the island.

“One of the telecommunications towers was actually broken in two. We have had a situation too where we have seen several containers moved as far as 100 yards. In fact, the airport itself is also damaged because one of the containers that was alongside the airport was lifted by the winds and would have done some damage on the airport runway itself so it cannot accommodate any form of airplane traffic,” Browne added.

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, executive director of the Barbados-based Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), Ronald Jackson, said they are still gathering details on the full extent of the devastation caused by Irma.

“We don’t have all the full details from the British Virgin Islands at the moment but given that the eye passed directly over Tortola, given the physical geographical conditions . . . we anticipate there should be significant needs being generated by the impact of the most severe aspects of the storm,” he said.

“We expect to see significant damage as a result,” he said, adding that CDEMA is now working to deploy teams into Antigua, hopefully by Thursday “mindful that our plans may be varied somewhat by the fast advancing storm Jose, which is moving within the wake of Irma and showing some signs that it could move along similar path.

“This means that there is a potential for secondary impacts for the north Leeward Islands (and) that is being factored into our plans for the moment, but for now we are hoping to deploy into Antigua as our focal point to serve the needs Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands from that point”.

He said even as the teams are being deployed “we are turning our attention, positioning teams to respond to potential impacts in Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas.

“Already we have on standby military engineers and doctors to respond to the needs of Turks and Caicos and Bahamas,” he said, adding that relief supplies are also being mobilised.