Hotel Irma

So you are in “paradise” just north of the equator and monitoring the inevitable late summer westbound tropical storm that has turned into hurricane force winds that has ultimately turned into an historic Category 5 monster that has decided to take a direct path onto your island.  You know the routine.  Put down the alcohol, cover the windows with anything and everything (you have tools, right?) and stock up with water food candles batteries radio flashlights.

In a Category 3 and even possibly a 4, you might be sufficiently protected if you nail over your doors and windows with plywood.   These are historically the highest winds that the Caribbean has experienced, and they are plenty high enough.  You nail plywood over doors and windows and offer a little prayer for the roof to hold up.  Electric will be shut off, it will be very dark at night, and you will have to rough it for a few days.  But a Cat 5—and one with purported gusts of 220mph—brings you into Tornado-type results, and the splintered and fragmented mobile housing that you see in the Middle United States is seen also in stronger structures of wood and even the blocky old-school concrete houses of the tropics.

So the blessing of a Cat 5 gives you what is almost a six-hour tornado, and all bets are off.  Even hardier bolts and screws securing the ply covering are an iffy proposition.  Along with the wind, that becomes a solid object at these speeds, is the storm surge, the rising of sea level due to low pressure, high winds, and waves, and this one was predicted to be ten-to-twenty feet.  The waves that you were frolicking in the day before would be going over the top of your second-story house.

Hurricanes always spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere because of the Coriolus Effect, which results from the earth spinning at a different speed at the Equator than the poles.  In its movement, the higher-pressure air surrounding the eye tends to move toward the low-pressure center, and the Coriolus effect results in the hurricane moving in a curved path, which is why you can never predict a direct hit until the last minute.  A North Atlantic hurricane always moves counterclockwise because of these forces and the Atlantic wind directions, and a direct hit will act like a horizontal table saw, pushing water storm surges, in a Category 5 hurricane, thirty feet high, over beach houses and well inland.  And it is not just water that’s being jetted at you at 185mph.  There are rocks—lots of them—in the bay, and they are fired in the water surge like cannonballs inland and aided by wind at a speed that is sufficient for liftoff for a Jumbo Jet.  The foot-and-a-half-wide concrete beach wall constructed of these same rocks on the North side of the island was no match for this volley.

Hurricane Irma in September 2017 had sustained winds of 185 mph with reported gusts of 220 mph.  Irma broke the record for consecutive hours at Category 5 wind speed, according to the Washington Post.  Its diameter was 425 miles, or roughly 215 from eye to edge.  It was a direct hit on the British Virgin Islands (BVI), moving NWW across the Atlantic, with maximum winds across roughly a sixty-mile radius.  This meant that the BVI was annihilated like a lawn by a mower, yet a mere fifty miles south, St. Croix was relatively unharmed, save for loss of electricity for a few days.  But with atmospheric conditions remaining constant, as they are prone to do in peak season, the next hurricane followed Irma’s path like a bowling ball in a gutter, and Maria, just barely lesser to her evil sister, made a beeline to St. Croix and then Puerto Rico, and then there were no docks, no airports, no electricity no radio stations between you and Miami.  You were on your own in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean, with no guarantee of water, food, or shelter.

The safest place to be in any hurricane in the Caribbean is away from the water.  But not too high up in the hills.  You want a place that has at least one fully concrete room, which many older local houses have.  But full-concrete houses are also the hottest, and that is a trade-off that has broader implications in this higher-stakes global warming world.  Tourists and residents want cool, comfortable houses with high ceilings, wooden roofs and wide, open windows.  The best non-concrete roof design regarding hurricanes is the hip roof, which has all sides rising up at an angle and meeting at a short top beam.   The standard gable roof, traditionally two planes “folded” down from the middle, picks up like a wing and lifts, exposing everything under it.  Even level, flat roofs will be taken up by the edge, because of the aerofoil difference in air pressure from above and below.

Morning September 6th found us sipping our coffee on the heavy wooden deck as the wind picked up, and we lingered until it was clearly time to head in.  I thought to myself that I would have a beer or two if this were a Cat 1, maybe a low Cat 2, where you could step outside for a minute and feel yourself pushed against the building.  Not with this one though.  Within the hour I stared out the small window in the door and then all I could see were clouds—water, actually—whipping by, just as if I were peering out the window of a jet thousands of feet in the sky. When the corner bedroom roof started peeling away early in the game, like a sardine lid, it was time to hunker down in the concrete corner bedroom, roughly 12’ x 12’, with a single “life” bag containing passport and strict necessities.  Irma was moving relatively quickly at 15mph, so it would be a “mere” six or eight-hour trial.   Not much food to grab, but certainly some bottled water.

Shortly afterwards, loud smashing and tearing sounds.  The pane-glass sliding doors exploding and, surprisingly, the heavy furniture including the stove and refrigerator.   There was a queen-size bed in our corner room, and we quickly broke up the bedframe to wedge the door closed, as it was shimmying and “breathing” from the atmospheric circus.  I had never seen a wooden door do that.

It is always a good idea to be with other people during a life-threatening milestone hurricane (!) for a number of reasons.  You can bounce ideas off of each other, and when your life is being threatened, you need to come up with a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C at EVERY MOMENT of the crisis.  If the window is blown out, what do you do to prevent being sucked out?  If the concrete roof goes because of falling trees or water seepage, where is the next best place to go?  The next best two places?  And how will you get there with winds that are picking up cars and whipping galvanized aluminum like giant razor blades?  I was lucky to be with two healthy guys who suppressed their panic and played mental chess for six hours as nature tried to play dice with our lives.  We stayed as far from the window as possible, even with its wooden shutters tied shut.  There were plenty of shirts in the closet to tear up if the glass shot into the room and tourniquets were necessary.  Was it overkill thinking this way?  Outside of this room, the rest of the house loudly obliterated.  Sofas, chairs, appliances boomed like ice in a tumbler—doing what?-- after all the glass windows were the first things to go—the ply covering meaningless.  Three hours of this, taking turns manning the wedged door, painting a picture of what was actually occurring outside of the room, waiting for the eye to pass over and a respite of sorts.  It never came. 

After six hours of checking the clock every half-hour to gauge how much longer was left, the winds dropped to a “mere” 150, it sounded like.  The noises eventually were more muffled.  When could we open the door and see what world was left?  It gets dark early in the Caribbean, and we did not know if we would step outside of our bedroom onto the drop of a hillside face outside of our bedroom, or if there were any semblance of a house left.  What does it mean when a solid sofa loveseat bounces against the walls and the fridge is in a different room?

We opened the bedroom door, jammed (a good thing) not from the rain but from the house frame at an angle from the wind.  It was around 6pm and still a bit light out.  The rest of the house was a mess of furniture, wires, glass, wood.  Just like tornado alley.  Fridge on its side.  No roof at all.  Tread carefully, as glass shards were everywhere, both underfoot and angled above and below.  It was still windy, and things could yet fly into the matchstick explosion cottage that hours before was a beautifully-appointed Caribbean bungalow.  Sections of galvanized aluminum roofing that were torn off in pieces like tin foil.  Don’t cut yourself at all, because you’d be unable to get to the hospital, assuming it and the roads were still there, and you don’t want to bleed out or get tetanus with no hospital and no means of communication.   Every house in sight—EVERY—was demolished, shattered—even the concrete shell structures had walls missing, not a clean roof in sight, wooden houses across the bay a pile of toothpicks.  How many people died in places like that?   Life changed Forever at that moment.  The island’s biggest event in its history, not the slightest question.  Darkness came soon afterwards without a hint of electricity anywhere.   We stayed alive.  It seemed true that we were going to make it through this day.  Words that sound like a cliché heard elsewhere but that was all we intended because YOU JUST DIDN’T KNOW.  Probability was meaningless.  We made all the right decisions up to that moment.   For seven hours we were operating at high frequency like a noisy radio dial, racking our brains to prevent serious injury and of course death, which was right outside the little structure you are within and consciously willing to hold up.  Nothing but IMMEDIATE FOCUS from moment to moment, monitoring sounds, wind noise, the panoply of awful possibilities outside of our little concrete room “spaceship” that our lives had condensed to.  Outside that room, a blendered house in name only.  No elation from winds “diminishing” to a little over a hundred miles an hour;  just the luxury of being able to dial it down a notch and not be dead.  Still too risky to venture outside, with God knows what sharp-edged objects flying around.  No bathroom breaks for all those hours, oddly enough.  The winds would still be gale force for a good while longer but thanks to Irma operating over daylight hours, we might be able to get a little fitful sleep during the coming night.  On a boxspring and a couple of sofa cushions.  What happened to the mattress?  I think we kept that outside to protect the bedroom door, and of course it got soaked.  What did we see below us in the bay nestled between hills that was supposed to be a nautical “hurricane hideway”?  The color of the water used to be one of the clearest indigo blues on the island, but it had changed to a muted darker grey.  Forty, fifty-foot yachts were parked up on the road, a hundred feet from the water.  A massive catamaran was sitting on top of a single-story business like a surreal hat.  No sound, no lights, electric shut off early island-wide when winds hit forty miles an hour.

Going into this, you knew that electric would be out for at least a number of days and with an ounce of foresight stocked up on the aforementioned candles, flashlights, batteries, tinned foods, water.  The post Cat 5 landscape however is the figuration of not just a superstorm, but the death of a country, a concept that sinks into you even as you try to reverse the catastrophe in your mind's eye.  You have survived, but the ride isn't free and you are forced to visually navigate the terrain that is minus any trees in every direction you look in.  The riot of lush green that denotes the standard Caribbean island is now a bristly grey carcass with sharp stumps dotting the surface.  You KNOW this was a record wind when not even palm trees are able to roll with the punches, and their lopped trunks are especially ugly.  Also missing was the endless rain that marks the entrance and exit of a usual hurricane.  This one at 200mph instead picked up seawater and flung it horizontally like clouds for eight hours-- the duration of a transatlantic flight-- searing the foliage with a salty brine.

Having been in close quarters physically and psychologically for eight hours, there will be time to acknowledge the teamwork behind staying alive and the unspoken bond that is forcibly made between the people that helped you survive.  But you also need solitude immediately afterwards.  To observe.  To calculate the meaning of the most powerful recorded storm in North Atlantic history and how you fit into the unwanted picture.  To weep, from shock and delayed stress response and protestation.  Around you the lack of lights at dusk renders a timeless aspect on your own now personal Hiroshima-- the silence is striking, as each family or band of brothers is processing the event within their own abodes that either held up well enough to keep them dry and alive or fragmented around them and forced them to put into action their Plan Bs and Cs that they hopefully configured in the mental calculus of survival.  No sound of children or domestic noises of any kind; pitch blackness ending the day like an awful stage curtain.  More driving pragmatic questions.  How much water do you have?   Better be careful with alcohol use, which will dehydrate you and affect your thinking, which still has to be sharp to engage in this new and dangerous world.  How long do we have to make the food last?  For me in particular, how do I stay out of the sun with no cover or foliage?

You desperately try to pick up a radio signal from anywhere.  Certainly not your island that was Irma's bullseye, as winds that could pick up a fifty foot catamaran twenty feet in the air would tangle radio cell towers like floss.   But you want to hear from Government, that they will warn you if another hurricane is forming, what to do after the biggest event in the island’s history, and sadly, whether they will send police to your part of the island, which will become a war zone with all of the dire social implications that inhere to the new paradise.

- Richard P., West Windsor Branch