Disaster!

We had big plans for our 3 week vacation starting on September 8, 2017.  With four 49 pound checked bags packed with building supplies we were ready a few days early to blast off and start getting the foundation ready for the building which was to arrive on site in December.  The plan was to set deck ledger boards on the foundation so that when the building arrived we could set up scaffolding easily.  My last day at work was September 5th.  On September 6th Hurricane Irma arrived in St Thomas.  Fortunately ATT was able to get texting working within 12 hours on the phones, and we were able to make contact with our Water Island friends.  As soon as we did we dumped all the building supplies out of the bags and went on a jaunt to Walmart to find the stuff they requested we bring.  Within a day we were again ready to go and thus began a three week wait for the St Thomas airport to open.  Meanwhile, the photos began to roll in and while we thought it was bad, it turned out to be way worse than we thought.

 

The Civil Air Patrol ran a photo mission 2 days after Irma took some very good detailed photos.  We were able to see that we got off fairly lightly compared to our neighbors.  Our container had lost it’s roof (and solar panels), but otherwise our stuff was OK.  As for the neighbors the picture says it all, our friend Charlie’s roof was in our yard, David’s very nice house had all the sheet metal roofing ripped off, and the house with the solar panels that appears undamaged had actually had a wall blown in and was gutted.  On the other side of the hill in Flamingo Pond it was a mess:

 

The boats in this picture are piled up in the very shallow Eastern side of the pond.  In 7 days Hurricane Maria would come with East winds.  Luckily for a few these winds blew some of the aground boats back into deeper water where they refloated!

In this last picture the damage to the vegetation is apparent.  In the brown areas the leaves were stripped off the trees.  You’ll notice that the Eastern side of the Island still has some green left.  Irma’s winds were from the West, so the East side of the Island saw less wind than the Western side.  In 7 days, Hurricane Maria would come with winds from the East and take the rest of the green.

After some initial setbacks in the first couple of days the peeps were doing better, everyone at least had food and somewhat clean water.  We added things to our load out to bring.  Highest in demand was bug spray and solar battery charging devices like this one:

https://amzn.to/2KdIFz4

For the bug spray this is what we’ve found works best.  It’s non aerosol so one bottle goes a long way:

https://amzn.to/2KfsKAo

Also in high demand was CASH!  For the first two weeks none of the credit card machines or ATMs were working.

 

 

One bright spot for us was this picture.  Just to the upper right of the center of the picture is Rolando’s compound of two Deltec houses.  They appeared undamaged, and indeed they were fine.  After the Hurricanes passed Rolando ended up rethinking his plan to retire as word got around about the storm worthiness of the Deltec houses.  Of the 20 or so in the USVI, only one was damaged.  This particular house had been bought for a location in Florida, then resold and erected in St John.  The builders didn’t consult Deltec about any engineering needed and failed to anchor it properly to the foundation.  As this was the first failure of a Deltec in the 49 year history of the company, they sent their chief engineer to the location to figure out what failed.  The house was rebuildable, and Deltec offered the owner’s free engineering for repairs.  Rolando meanwhile soon found himself very busy with around 10 contracts for Deltec houses.  He also became Deltec’s exclusive distributor for the Caribbean.  They couldn’t have picked a better contractor!

For us it became a tiresome waiting game for the airport to open.  It finally opened over a month later.  Hurricane Maria came and went, fortunately with less damage than Irma, probably mainly because everything was already wrecked!  Finally with my return to work imminent we gave up and sent our relief supplies through St Thomas Cargo.  When we were finally able to get out there in the middle of October it was sad that our supplies showed up about the same time we did.  We spent a week there, mainly clearing the wreckage from our property.  We were pleasantly surprised to see that once we turned over what was left of our container roof 5 of our 6 solar panels were OK.  The recovery continued after we left, and the first cruise ship arrived on November 4th.  The beach was cleaned up and Water Island was back in business.  Electric power took a lot longer, just before Christmas it was restored.

We were actually on our property (far left) when this picture was taken in October.

Deltec asked if we wanted to delay the December delivery of our house.  We really didn’t see any reason to, so we were still on the master schedule.