headless chickens and the like

The week after returning from Grand Turk has been frantic. Monday's round of phone calls revealed, finally, that they did want 30 toilets sent over to be used for the tent city (turns out this is just a feeding station rather than for people to sleep at too), so that day was very busy loading up the toilets and getting them to the dock for shipping. The crucial deal here was that we would not have to pay for shipping them if we got them there for 6pm. There were the inevitable cock ups with us being told to go to point A when we needed to be at point B, getting to point B only to discover that some of the unloaders didn't have ID on them and couldn't enter the port (leaving Nicky to do all the work), no container had been organised (making shifting 30 toilets that much harder). We also shipped over the white poop truck (an Isuzu flat bed with a tail lift and a small pump on board) which we knew needed a new starter motor. Everything got to the dock on time, and arrived in Grand Turk the following lunchtime.

Nicky went over on Thursday with the new starter motor to fit to the truck and get these toilets into position and set up. Except the truck refused to start. He spent a very frustrating day driving around trying to find somewhere that could fix the truck...but no-one could. He commented that the island was now in a more backward and under-developed state than it had been 20 years ago when he lived there. So right now we have 30 toilets at the dock in Grand Turk, a truck that won't start and the bad news that PPC (the local power company) that were 'sponsoring' the free shipping has withdrawn their deal. So whilst the obvious solution is to bring the truck back to Provo where it would be fixed in a heartbeat, no-one knows when the next barge is leaving Grand Turk and we'd have to pay for it. What looked like the potential for us to expand the business in Grand Turk (currently without a portable toilet provider) is beginning to look like the proverbial white elephant - and an expensive one at that. The government mechanic took a look at the truck today and he couldn't figure out what was wrong with it either. Nicky is now booked to go back on Monday with Cholo to see if they (Cholo took out the old starter motor) fix it. The real worry, of course, is that in the meantime someone manages to find a means of pumping the toilets and steals the contract out from underneath us. Although with our toilets currently languishing at the dock it is all rather academic.

Does it appear to be very unsavoury to be talking about making money at a time like this? Well I guess to some extent it does. But bottom line is that we make money renting out toilets and cannot afford to let 30 of them go for free. We are certainly not looking to make a killing out of this, but whilst there are funds to set up the toilets (Rotary are paying for them) then we didn't feel bad at making them an offer. It's not as though we've not given heaps of labour and money to the relief effort as it is in terms of food, tools and a generator to folk on the island. Grand Turk is only 60 miles away and yet at times like this it may as well be the other side of the world for all the difficulty of getting there. A friend today suggested we try getting Nicky a seat on the DC3 which Missionary Flights International are running at the moment, or on the US Coast Guard helicopters, but no contacts have revealed themselves as yet.

The other devastating news this week was that Colin (he who was taken ill the night the hurricane struck) died on Tuesday night in Miami. He had pancreatic cancer which took him very quickly (barely a week from diagnosis to death) and he very sadly never made it back to the islands. Having to cope with the destruction of homes is one thing, but doing all that AND coping with the loss of the head of the family is a whole other order of magnitude. Of course, with no phone lines and no power, there are no fax machines on the islands so we had to act as the intermediary for the hospital in Miami to fax down the release papers to Provo, which Nicky took on a plane to GT, for his widow to sign, for Nicky to bring back and then fax back to Miami the following day. You tend to forget all the simple things in life that can't be done when there is no power.

Whilst Nicky was on Provo on Thursday he also fell into conversation ("why does he always fall into compersation" says Osh!) with the insurance assessors over there. Turns out that the rumour that the miserable assessors wouldn't go on account of there being no cold beer and no TV was just a vicious rumour. The reality was that there was such a huge demand for them and so few of them that people were (and still are) waiting days to see them. Anyway, these men said that the number of uninsured and dramatically under-insured on the island was staggering. Nicky's depressing assessment of the situation was that the entire place was being managed by a group of headless chickens that had no idea what to do (not dissimilar to the US after Katrina in that respect), no-one wanted to delegate (thus losing what little bit of influence and kudos they'd attained as a result of the disaster) and ultimately, the island may never recover. The notion that nothing was being done - that is, folk sitting back and waiting for Government to step in and mend their roof etc - that there was an un-urgent atmostphere about doing anything was confirmed by others that have been over there since. A Jamaican friend sagely noted that, following Hurricane Gilbert 20 years ago, some communities are still struggling to get back to where they were, and today someone noted that Grand Bahama, devastated by a hurricane some years back never recovered economically. In fact, the influx of Bahamians here was largely due to them moving south in search of employment and opportunities in the Turks.

The first cruise ship returns on 8 October. If the terminal is reasonably functioning (at the moment the artificial beach is no longer there, the pool is full of filthy water etc) the boats will come and the employment for many will return and things might just start again. But if the major cruise lines opt to avoid Grand Turk (on account of there being no 'facilities' there - and by that I mean bars, shops and a pool....these cruising types are not remotely interested in the historic sites away from the terminal) then all the other cruise lines (including the smaller 'quality' ones) will drop out too and that will be the end of Grand Turk's rise to prosperity as we know it. Sobering thoughts.

Another sobering thought is that my doctor has raised a tiny concern about Baby Turnip's development and is booking me an appointment to see a peri-natologist in Miami next week. Whilst all other indicators are bang on target, she is concerned that I am not as big as I ought to be (I had also noted that this bump didn't feel anywhere near as uncomfortable as Osh did at the same stage). There are no peri-natologists on island, and no facilities at all for premature babies. So I'm off to Miami at some point for the day - fingers crossed that this is just my doctor being (thankfully) over-cautious. Worst case scenario is that there is something wrong with the baby and I'll have to go back to the UK to have it taken out early. I'm currently 28 weeks so viability is good (if not brilliant) but the cost of doing all that in the US would be eye-watering. And of course on top of all the other worries and difficulties we have at the moment it is the sort of hiccup we don't need. But we'll soldier on as we always have! Pip Pip.

The aftermath of Ike

Osh sluicing himself down with fresh water out the tank after a cooly dip in the sea.

When we finally got word from Grand Turk it was from Daniel's Aunt on her cell phone up in Miami. The night Ike struck her father - Colin (to all intents and purposes Nicky's ex-step father-in-law...the relationships are complex here!) a lovely man, had been taken ill and was admitted to hospital with jaundice. He was discharged later that night as the roof of the hospital started to detach from the walls (not conducive to good medical care, as a rule) and they moved the 'walking wounded' out. Monday morning first thing he and Donna (his daughter) were air-lifted out to Miami. We learned that Colin was under going tests and that Grand Turk had indeed been devastated by Ike - we knew at this point that Daniel's mum had lost the roof to her house, Donna had lost the roof to her house, Daniel's grandmother (thank goodness) had retained the roof to her house and had a generator so all the family were now decamped to her place. Jay, Daniel's Mum's husband had lost his fishing boat (which he'd made a point of taking out of the water and moving to the leeward side of his house) which is his primary source of income. The cruise terminal had been destroyed - Donna makes her living selling jewellery at the cruise terminal. All in all things looked bleak: not only were there immediate problems in terms of comfort and housing, but potentially long term problems with income too. You can imagine that with no power on the islands and the upper stories of Scotia Bank gone (ie banks not in operation at this point) that cash was in very very short supply. The prospect of income not being there altogether can't have helped moral either.

For the rest of that week we spent hours on the phone trying to get hold of Martin, our friend who owns the Saltraker (a lovely old building on Grand Turk) to see if there was anything we could do. Martin (in Somerset) had little information and getting hold of Erika (the manager) was hard. All day we could hear DC10s taking off with relief supplies for Grand Turk (and South Caicos and Salt Cay which had been equally badly hit) and we had US Coast Guard helicopters flying over us delivering supplies. The airport was closed to everything but emergency aid traffic and Provo had gone into overdrive. We were inundated with texts giving us information on where to donate money and food, the supermarkets were collecting unwanted hurricane supplies, the biggest 'department store' on the island (for want of a better way to describe it!) was collected used plywood, CBMS the concrete provider were organising free shipment of packages to Grand Turk, there was not a generator to be had across Provo as people rushed to buy up what was left to ship to friends and relatives on the stricken islands. Commercial flights resumed on the Thursday and, having organised a generator (thank you Belinda!) he and Daniel left on the first flight to see what they could do to help family and friends at the Saltraker.

Life for us had returned to more or less normal on Provo: school started up finally on the Thursday (much to the relief of many parents!); the power was finally back on in Five Cays and Leeward (the poorest and richest neighbourhoods respectively) and everything was working as normal. Oisin and I flew to Grand Turk on Friday after school armed with food, lamps, water, money, crow bars, hammers and heavy duty work gloves. The scene of devastation on Grand Turk was breathtaking.

The original airport building - an old steel structure abandoned about 5 years ago - had completely collapsed in on itself; there was a small light aircraft with it's nose buried in the turf where the wind had tossed it like a toy; there were two cars on top of each other in the airport car park. Clearly, things had been far, far more violent here than in Provo. The drive into town revealed barely any telegraph poles standing - those that were strewn all over the roads were snapped in half. Some houses had lost just shingles, but many had no roof, their insides fully exposed to the world: possessions and the traces of homes on full public view (often, the roof goes then a wall collapses). There was not a single leaf left on any tree standing. Only the coconuts had managed to hang onto a few fronds but these looked very battered. The whole place looked like a deserted town, derelict after years of neglect. Tellingly, the old buildings had all survived with a bit of roof damage. It was the modern, new buildings that had suffered the worse. Unfortunately, Woodville, an old, old building that Colin was restoring (it had been in Daniel's family for a number of generations) did not fare well: the roof has mostly gone and many of the wooden walls have now lost their siding, leaving the building more exposed to the weather than it had been before.

We went to set up beds at Island House - all done by lamp light as dark by now then went to get fish and chips and a cold beer at the Turks Head (the only place on the island serving food and anything approaching a cold drink - courtesy of a generator). The following morning saw us breakfasting on the food I'd brought from Provo (the supermarket was closed on account of it having lost it's roof, a couple of small, small Haitian and Dominican shops were open, but with nothing really to sell) and then we set out to the Saltraker. The building had survived: it is around 200 years old, made of wood and has lived through a number of big hurricanes. Erika described how they were huddled in the upstairs corridor, breaking up furniture in the middle of the hurricane to fix windows as shutters were ripped off the outside and the glass gave way under the pressure. She said it was the most frightening experience she has ever been through and she described the whoomf, whoomf sound as the building LITERALLY flexed in and out as the pressure from the hurricane threatened to crush the place into match wood. Again and again, people have said it is a miracle that no-one died that night. The mess out the back of the Saltraker was astounding. Where there used to be a tin-roofed covered eating area, surrounded by huge mature trees and bougainvilleas was a dramatic tangle of dead branches, leaves, buckled tin sheets and tar. The roof had come off the kitchen (a building separate to the hotel itself), that roof was lodged in the one tree that remained standing and providing a background noise to the scene was the periodic clattering of a lone sheet of zinc bent over a branch way up in another tree in the other yard as it waved in the wind. Again, the place looked like it had been abandoned for years....

A big problem that people have had in Grand Turk is that they can't clear up until the insurance assessors have been to visit. There is clearly a huge demand for them at the moment and the rumours that they (mostly white folk from the US) didn't like flying backwards and forwards on small aircraft and weren't prepared to overnight with no ac, no ice, no tv, no internet connection didn't help morale any. Erika had been unable to do anything to the hotel itself, but we could set to work on the garden. The first job was to clear out the debris. Nicky had spent all day Thursday and Friday doing this, and we made another huge dent in it on Saturday. That afternoon Micky and Annie turned up (they'd been made homeless - when asked how her house had fared Annie replied " it no longer exists" - gulp!) to help along with Terry and Donna. Many hands make light work and by sundown we were all exhausted but had cleared much of the back yard. Osh was terrific, helping drag branches to the pile for the following day's bonfire and generally charming all the women with his winning ways. He'll be known for years to come as the little boy that came to help (the number of white folk coming from Provo to help was pitiful). His reward for being so good was lots of fun in the sea with Daniel's cousins (about his age) that evening. The disturbing news Saturday morning was that the Turks Head had been ordered to cease selling food and cold drinks. The man who has the lease is not the best-liked person on the island and proceeded to NOT cover himself in glory as the day went on. Apparently he'd decided that he didn't like the accounting in the bar by his bar manager (someone he's never got along with) so he shut the place down. On an island with very few generators, that one source of electric light, ice and a chance to wind down was a much needed haven and there were a lot of demoralised people around Saturday night.

Nicky lived on Grand Turk for a number of years and knows all the old haunts so we set out to find some food for us that night (more corned beef and tinned potato salad that we ate for lunch didn't appeal much). We chanced upon the Legal Begal, a Dominican bar serving hot food and cold beer - I went through the farcical situation of having to yell at the girl behind the bar about what we wanted because they had the music at full volume on account of a) the generator outside (very noisy) and b) they are Dominicans and don't know how to do anything quietly. Had there been others in the bar, I'd've understood her reluctance to turn the volume down, but there was no-one in there. So what could have taken 2 minutes took 5 on account of the deafening noise [note to self: maybe I should write the order down rather than try and shout?]. Waiting for the food outside we chatted to Frances, an elderly Haitian woman living in a garden shed (although I've seen better garden sheds, to be honest) behind the restaurant. Most of her belongings were outside drying, one wall of the shed was, erm, not there and she was still paying $150 a month for the privilege of living there...Dinner that night, eaten watching the sun go down from the trashed terrace of Island House was wolfed down and we collapsed exhausted in bed at 8.30 (what else do you do with no light?!?).

Sunday was more of the same: a bonfire to burn the rubbish (the dump was closed and reportedly the gates piled high with garbage as folk tried to keep the rats away from their houses with the mounting piles of steaming food scraps) and taking apart the kitchen roof so it could be burned. Every 20 minutes or so Nicky took a refreshing dip in the sea followed by a sluice down with fresh water from the tank. Access to water, per se, is not an issue there. Access to clean water is a whole other matter. Most of the water tanks are contaminated with plant debris - fine for bathing in but you'd not want to drink or cook with the stuff (which under normal circumstances is what people do because normally the tanks are clean). Osh and I spent most of the day building lego things in the shade (it was very very hot), dreaming of ice and fans and sluicing ourselves with water from the tank (which was refreshingly cool).

The Red Cross were doing the rounds on Sunday dishing out mosquito nets and water purification tablets and we took the opportunity to check out 'tent city' which is being set up for the est. 500 homeless. It is a grim affair (mind you, I suppose refugee camps are never anything but grim...and this is effectively what it is) with a large clear walled tent set up in a barren plot of land. Blue Loos has been asked to provide toilets for the sites on Grand Turk (two, reportedly one for TIs and the other for 'foreigners'), South Caicos and Salt Cay.

A telling note about all this: when we got home on Sunday night I took Osh into the bathroom to clean his teeth and he said "isn't electricity great Mim, you can turn on a light and flush the loo and have ice too"...

That was the night that was

Provo International Airport the morning after the night before.

OK, now I have the chance to start putting some of the past week down in words for you all. It took us an age to clear up after Hanna - messy girl that she was. She plonked herself on us, then wandered off to the DR and then came back again - spookily making a 'boot' shape on the hurricane maps. It rained for days - I think by Wednesday the sun was out again and we could start to dry things off. On Thursday and the Friday we made two forays to the lock-up to rescue the balance of our 'stuff' just in case the predicted 12' storm surge for Ike became a reality. I had 6 lovely feather pillows that were liberally doused in sea water and they washed very well in the machine, but just don't dry fast enough in the sun and I'm not sure we'll ever be able to stand the smell of them! We managed to rescue the frontispiece of the bible given to Nicky's Dad when he left school to join the RAF...but sadly the rest of the book was trashed. Other lovely items that Nicky had brought from the UK were also damaged with water: they clearly now tell a story but not the story that was perhaps intended of them!

On top of all this Nicky was frantically cutting hurricane shutters and fitting to the many windows in the house. You really can't risk guessing which direction the winds are going to come from - you have to cover all the windows. Mostly to prevent things hitting them and breaking the glass but also to give them another layer of protection against the force of the wind itself. For once (according to Nicky) the hardware stores appeared to have ample supplies of plywood, lamps, candles, matches etc and were doing a roaring trade in generators. The sun was out, the wind had dropped and the last two days of frantic preparation were very very hot and exhausting. You may ask yourself why we didn't have any shutters prepared. And the reason is that it is very rare that these islands get anything more than a tropical storm or maybe a Cat 1 passing by. So in the intervening years with no action the plywood gets used up for other stuff, lost, warped etc. We've now determined to keep this lot labelled and safe for the next time.

By Saturday morning the last of the shutters was up but then we got a call from the boat yard. Nicky and another chap are 'looking after' a boat for someone who is doing time in the US (lots and lots of time apparently!). This boat was not in the water (best place for a boat during a hurricane is out the water) but we were in no position to move it and besides, she'd already fallen over during Hanna and as far as we knew she was safe. But Saturday morning we get anxious phone calls from people saying the boat needed moving because she was likely to shift during Ike and damage all the shiny boats in the harbour. Fair enough....only it transpired that the other 'looker after' had inspected the boat 2 days after Hanna, didn't know what to do with her so hopped on his plane to Haiti to avoid Ike. The notion of calling Nicky and saying 'you need to do something with this boat' or indeed 'WE need to do something about this boat' clearly never crossed his mind. So there we were, 12 hours before a hurricane (predicated at a cat 3 at this stage) was due to hit, with not a crane available for love nor money and a boat that clearly needed 'dealing with'. So we dealt with it (lashed it down to a variety of heavy rocks) and then got on with everything else.

Down at the farm there is a wooden house which is in a sad state of repair these days but does provide free and mostly water-tight accommodation for our labourers. We were not convinced that it would withstand a Cat. 3 (and besides it would have been extraordinarily scary in there even if it did stay standing) so we removed Darius, Julio and Cholo along with their precious possessions up to our house. By this point the wind had picked up and the rain had started. By 7pm we were all safe inside the Plantation Hills house, everything mobile outside had been moved indoors or strapped down, beds had been moved away from ac units (most likely to leak in the hurricane) precious possessions in the bedrooms wrapped up in plastic in case the roof came off, supper was on, the house was very hot and steamy (all the doors and windows are shored up at this point) and we waited nervously for the fun to begin. Remember that by now we had no internet and all we knew was that a Cat 4 was going to hit us.

Sleep should have come quickly that night - we were all so tired, but the sense of anticipation was palpable. I was going through mixed emotions of: please let us get a biggy so all this work was worthwhile (bit like preparing a lavish party and hoping everyone shows up) and please don't let it be too big and damage the house. But of course hoping that you don't get a full hit means you are wishing it on someone else.....We had cleared out the office (in a converted garage on the ground floor and the most protected room in the house) as the emergency shelter but decided we'd start off in our own beds and see how it went. Osh went out like a light in his room. About 2am he came up to us as the screaming and whistling wind battered the back of the house, shaking the plywood at the patio doors. The rain and the wind came in huge gusts and then would ease off for a couple of minutes and then come at us again. Upstairs in our room which has 3 exposed walls and no attic between us and the roof it was deafening. Seconds after Osh jumped into bed, Nicky asked if I'd like to go downstairs, no I said, I'm fine. Seconds after that an almighty banging noise started on the roof of our room. With no way of knowing what it was (something hitting the roof or the roof starting to lift off?) we hot footed it down to Osh's room which is more sheltered. I've never moved so fast in my life. Osh bless him took it all in his stride and went straight back to sleep again. As it was, turns out that it was some of the guttering whacking our roof as it slowly tore itself from its brackets. The power went out at about 4am (we are astonished it lasted that long) and then it got seriously miserable: no AC, no fans, no ventilation, no sleep, tremendous noise. We all dropped off eventually and woke about 8.30 (it was so dark on account of the shutters the normal dawn light made no impact on us) feeling ropey and edgy.

The storm, by and large had passed. It was very windy outside and raining hard, but much MUCH quieter than it had been during the night. We made tea (what else does a Brit do in the face of disaster?!) on the camping stove we found (what luck!) in the hardware store the day before and began mopping up the buckets of water that had forced their way through every nook and cranny. The winds came exclusively from the North so only the back of the house leaked (thank goodness). I ventured outside....there was guttering everywhere, some shingles around but not many (probably thanks to the Dominicans on the roof last thing Saturday glueing down anything that moved), the huge industrial gas BBQ which we put on the deck the previous day had been shifted a good foot backwards....Daniel and Nicky can just about lift it so imagine the power of that wind! A good number of branches had been snapped off trees but by and large there was no visible damage.

The road from our place to the main highway (only route out) was impassable except in the big blue poop truck, so Nicky took the 3 labourers back to the farm to see if they did indeed have a home to go to. We followed a while later and lo....the little wooden house was intact! Hurrah for Nicky's building skills! Another pile of mature trees at the nursery had fallen over - mostly sea-grapes that are very brittle (there goes my proposed sea-grape jam making fest!) and Ficus trees that have very shallow root systems. What was remarkable was that the white 40' container that was sitting on it's legs and wheel base (ie just missing the cab to drive it away) and full of stuff (heavy) had fallen over. This thing is massive but Ike had just flicked it on its side. Not on top of, I'm happy to report, the new tiles we'd just bought for the house. With so much to do the previous couple of days we'd not got around to moving the tiles and both knew there was a risk they'd get crushed if the container went over but we'd decided that we'd got bigger things to deal with.

The flood lights at the ball park had all fallen over - one of them missing La Familia (our favourite Dominican restaurant) by a matter of feet. And those are HUGE floodlights! The airport was all boarded up and flooded, there were street lamps down on Leeward Highway and some roofs missing lots of shingles but nothing too dramatic. That afternoon, we went for a drive around and to try and get some food from the supermarket for the labourers. Blue Hills down on the coast had taken a beating - most of the telegraph poles were down, huge fat cable waving in the wind and strewn all over the road. There were piles of sand all over the road too where clearly the sea (which must have been boiling with huge waves) had come clear over the road. The gas station awning was strewn all over the place and the rash of new buildings - most of them not built to code or with planning permission had taken a battering.

The supermarket had been used as one of many hurricane shelters but had opened for a couple of hours so folk could buy essentials. We grabbed the last bag of meat, a bag of rice and some water for the labourers and then stood exchanging stories in the long, long queues. IGA is the only swanky supermarket on the island and is usually full of rich white folk in the queues. Now it was mostly TIs there...all the rich white folk had run away before the storm. Jamaica, Trinidad and the Bahamas had sent planes to take their citizens out (OK, so not white folk but you get the picture!), a number of the big building companies had chartered planes to get their managers out the country (note that their Chinese labourers were all squashed into church halls!) and many others had gone to Florida or the DR to escape the worse. There was a certain sense of pride derived from the fact that we'd not been 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys' in the face of Ike. It was a tough call though: stay and face possible injury and certain discomfort or leave and then spend a week worrying about what had happened to the house and being unable to get back into the country?

Reports that fights were breaking out in the supermarket over the limited number of hot pizzas available (the supermarket was one of the few places with a generator - there was no power at all on the island at this point) appear to be true. Sadly, most of those fights were over Turks Islanders resenting non-Turks Islanders (ie Haitians) being in front of them in the queue. Nothing like a disaster to bring out the best in folk!

The food delivered to the workers, we got home to find that the power was back on. Living directly opposite the hospital has its advantages! What a joy: cooking by electric light with fans and everything! Although our cell phones were working, there was no word at all from friends and family on Grand Turk - only alarming (and almost certainly wildly inaccurate) reports that 80% of the houses there had been damaged/destroyed (depending on who you listened to).

The following morning (ie Monday morning) school was still closed - no surprise that, but by this point Osh had been off school for a week (he thought this was great!) - and we went to inspect the lock up - it had survived, no storm surge although the doors of the neighbour's lock up had been blown off. By Tuesday that sun was out and everything appeared to be back to normal....or was it?

I guess the one saving grace in all this is that we've been spared newspaper reports of the Premier biting his wife (I kid you not) or other salacious rumours of his impending divorce!

more photos from Hurricane Ike

The airport fuel centre under water after Ike - we usually park at the far end of the hedge to turn on and off the pump....this now under about 2' of water.
Ike approaching about 6.30pm on the Saturday night.
Telegraph poles snapped clean in half all over Grand Turk.
This used to be a lovely enclosed garden behind the Saltraker, all the tin roof which ran from the foreground of the photo to the green bar at the back is now in bits on the floor.
Satellite dishes at the abandoned US Air Force Base on Grand Turk ripped from their stands.

All quiet on the western front.

A thousand million apologies for no news at the very point when my little islands were all over the news! Our internet connection went out last Thursday night and we only got the connection back this morning (over a week later) because Cable and Wireless were concentrating on getting phone connections back up and working after the 2 hurricanes. The past 10 days have been extraordinary to say the least and I promise to give you all the stories very soon. The short version is this:



Hanna covered all our precious belongings with salt water and some 3 days later the sun came out and the temperature soared just as Hurricane Ike was barrelling towards us for a direct hit. The heat is not the best time to be frantically cutting plywood to batten down the hatches! By Saturday afternoon we were all exhausted from plywooding the windows, strapping down the little wooden house, evacuating the labourers (3 of them) out of the wooden house which we were not sure was going to survive a direct hit and buying in supplies. Ike had been a cat. 2 going north of us, but he then gained strength and headed WSW. What made this all the more scary was we had no internet connection so no up to date information and were relying on phone calls from Grand Turk and the UK to give us a position. Our last news was about 4pm Saturday afternoon when Ike was going to pass about 30 miles to the north of Grand Turk as a Cat. 4....putting the eye slap bang over the top of Provo. The winds started about 6pm, by 2am they were screaming around the house, the power went out at 4am, we got no sleep at all and by 8am it was just very wet and windy outside. We had no power until about 4pm Sunday afternoon (we are on the same circuit as the hospital, hence the early return of power), many folk didn't get any power back until Wednesday afternoon.



The damage on Provo was mostly flooding, stripped shingles from roofs, all the floodlights down at the ball park and some tin roofs buckled. Most of the telegraph poles in Blue Hills were down across the road, but by and large, nothing too serious.



Despite numerous attempts we couldn't get any word from Grand Turk (Daniel's family live there) until Monday when we discovered that Ike, as a Cat. 4 gusting a Cat. 5 had gone right over the top of them (rumours of gusts up to 200 mph....!). Rumours flying around were that 80% of the houses there (and South Caicos and Salt Cay) had been damaged.



More news from Grand Turk came through during the week and on Thursday Nicky and Daniel flew over armed with tools and food to help out, Osh and I went after school Friday to also help out and take more supplies. The destruction on Grand Turk is biblical. I'll post more details later (very tired after an exhausting weekend on GT - working conditions worse than I ever experienced in rural Bangladesh or Ghana!) but in the meantime I think the photos will help you see what mother nature can do when she puts her mind to it. No-one died (miraculously) but Grand Turk is going to take a long time to recover from this and the living conditions there are the moment are grim to say the least.

The huge Ficus tree outside the little wooden house came down in Hurricane Hanna. Can probably be set back up again once it is pruned.

Boarding up the house for Hurricane Ike - makes it very dark and stuffy inside.

Ike blew over this container which was full of stuff (not ours, thank goodness) but fortunately didn't land on top of the new floor tiles that we simply ran out of time to move (needed the fork lift to move them and it was stuck in several feet of water at the airport!).

Ike put one car on top of another at Grand Turk airport.....

All the branches on one side of this Norfolk Pine have been completely removed by Ike....

Counting the cost

We went back to the lock-up this morning and rescued more stuff that didn't get soaked, a pile of bedding that was soaked (all came up fine in the washing machine) and more of Nicky's wood (currently soaking in fresh water).

The degree to which we had gotten off this very lightly was highlighted by a discussion with the man who has the lock-up next door. He, and our neighbours the other side, both run carpentry workshops. He'd arrived at 11pm on Monday night to find thigh high flood water washing around in his lock-up....all around the masses of expensive woodworking machinery and wood. He is now out of business for the time being. He's seen flood waters 4 times before, but on each previous occasion there was sufficient warning to move stuff and the waters had been nowhere near as high or damaging as this time. The chap on the other side had just been delivered $20,000 of specialist wood and $50,000 of specialist equipment (mostly computer controlled) to complete the contract to make ALL the doors for a new resort. He is also now unable to do the contract and is out of business. Faustino, who has the next lock up runs an import business...the only thing salvageable from his business is the beer: the rice, crackers, mattresses, soft furnishings are done for. Sobering thoughts. Thank heavens our toilets are plastic and mostly immune from damage.

The sun has just come out, it is still very windy and the pressure is still falling, but in the lull between driving rain, Nicky is outside fixing a wooden frame around the patio doors in the two bedrooms so we can screw plywood to them just before Ike pays us a call. The point of the plywood is to prevent objects breaking the glass and allowing the wind into the house. Given what it did in the lock-up, I believe 'nuff respect' for what wind can do in an enclosed space is the phrase we are looking for here.

Searching for references to Hanna on the news media, even the BBC failed to mention that the eye had gone right over the top of us - the Bahamas got a mention but one of the last pink bits on the map didn't merit anything. And another report on the Guardian website about Gustav and how it had failed to deliver the bad news (major hurricane/broken levees) notes that in order to boost the appearance of bad weather, the reporters had their coats open (more flapping) and their hair untied (looks wilder). Clearly, this man has never experienced 80 mph winds and thinks that just because it is not a cat. 5 hurricane it is just a bit blustery. Idiot.

unwanted guests (and gusts!)

Normally, hurricanes/tropical storms have a mostly westerly track, veering north at some point. How far west they get dictates if they hit Louisiana or Florida. Hanna is clearly not only large (she has a big butt, according to Osh) and very slow, but also has no idea when she has outstayed her welcome. As you can see from the above 'history' she started in the mid Atlantic (blue = tropical depression), wandered towards us (green = tropical storm) wandered all over the top of Provo (yellow = hurricane cat 1) and then wandered southwesterly. Then southerly. She is currently wandering eastwards and a bit north. Ie, coming back for another go! It is extremely windy outside, very very wet. Not cold outside - somewhere in the mid 20s Celsius and very pleasant indoors (no need for the AC at the moment). Everywhere is a bit damp, and we have a constant cycle of spinning out the towels in the washing machine to mop up the water that leaks through the doors, and doing anything to secure the outside of the house in preparation for Ike is tricky on account of it being so wet and windy. But, things could be worse. Today's job is to get the wood to secure the house, and then brace ourselves for a visit to the farm to see just what is left of the mist house (probably not much). At least the plants are getting watered!

School has been cancelled again, so Osh thinks this is a great hoot!

Disaster!

We had a number of jobs to do today: check on the lock-up (to see whether the waters got in), check on Tucker's Hill and buy supplies for the arrival of Ike on Sunday. First job, the lock up. And what a disaster. It has a high, barrel roof (all built of steel) and large roll down doors on the front. The doors had a foot long vertical gash at the bottom through which, apparently, came the wind and the rain. The sight inside the lock-up defied belief. The previous day we'd moved the toilets that were outside to inside the lock up and, as the eye passed over us, we'd moved boxes of books, toys, bedding etc up off the floor - some of it into the toilets themselves. But, the wind got INSIDE the lockup and tossed the 30 toilets around like they were play things.



As we opened the door we could see a toilet on its back (these things are about 8' tall, blue plastic and movable by Nicky when they are empty - so large, but not too heavy)...then I saw Oisin's Halloween trick or treat basket by the door (a good 15' from where I know it was stored in a box). Then, after righting the first toilet we saw others knocked over - like dominoes. Then I picked up a can on its side and it was a full, brand new tin of floor preservative which - get this - had been in a stack of similar tins 15' away on the other side of the container. Just how strong was that wind that it caused all this!?!

Osh walking towards the lock-up - the sea would normally be the other side of the greenery in the background.
Doesn't look too bad until we worked towards the back and all the toilets had been thrown around like matchboxes.

With a rapidly expanding belly I wasn't much good at righting the toilets (too fat to squeeze between the gaps!) but we eventually got them upright and started on the upsetting task of finding out what was trashed and what had survived. Putting stuff inside the toilets was a godsend - worked a treat. But the boxes we'd stored on top of the toilets had, of course, been launched across the lock-up when the toilets fell over. I finally established that the stack of photo albums was safe, Nicky's diaries from years ago survived. Unfortunately a pile of second hand books are trash (we had a good 2' or more of salty storm surge in the place) along with a good number of photo frames...we might have saved some of the photos but I fear that my collection of photos from Bangladesh and Ghana (taken in the days before digital cameras and I don't have the negatives) have been lost forever. Nicky's collection of antique woodworking tools were all sitting in salt water - we've brought them back and rinsed them and currently drying them. Hopefully they will survive the experience. I didn't let Osh come to the back of the lock-up for fear he'd be too upset by the sight of his puzzles all utterly sodden but he was delighted to hear that the Christmas tree had survived, but quite how ruined the box of decorations is, is anyone's guess and ditto his toy box. The tide was coming in fast (though fortunately it was now a good 12' from the door) and we needed to deal with the immediate problems. Tomorrow's job is to go back and access the rest of the damage.

To add insult to injury, when we tried to leave we found that the huge, heavy roller door had jammed open and despite an hour's swearing and banging it with a hammer, it remained resolutely open. So long as we can shut it before Ike arrives, we'll be OK...no-one wants to nick a pile of portable toilets or boxes of sodden bedding (which I'm hoping I can rescue in the washing machine once I have some dry air to dry it all). And then, we got back to the house and the power went off again...cold pizza for lunch then!


All in all, things could have been a whole lot worse: Barrie might not have called and we might not have thought to go check on our things and move them; the lock up might not have been so full of toilets in which case the damage from just a few being thrown around could have been much worse; the bulk of our irreplaceable possessions had already been moved to the house and were out of harm's way; the wind could have taken the roof off the lock-up (hurricanes get very cross when they get in a tight space and have no obvious exit point). Awesome to think of the power of Hanna...and she was only a category 1, Ike is forecast to be a Cat. 2 and Gustav, that just raged through Cuba was a Cat. 5.

The sad, muddy, silty, soggy remains...

More from the weather zone as power and time permit!

the morning after the night before.

Finally, we have power again - which is good because that saucepan was going to take an age to boil water on the bbq. Last night, about 5pm Osh and I noticed that everything had gone quiet and the wind had dropped. But, and here's the critical thing, the barometer was dropping fast, which is not good. The only conclusion we could come to, was that the eye of the hurricane (where the pressure is at its lowest but the winds at their most benign) was right over the top of us. We were 2 hours from the next available storm update, and a conversation with a friend with boats in a harbour confirmed that the winds + the low pressure + high tide was going to spell disaster down at the lock-up where many of my possessions are still in boxes. So, risking the opposite wall of the hurricane slamming into us when we were out, we rushed out in the white truck to get the boxes of books and photos off the floor. We got to the lock up to find that the sea was inches from the door....and we got home with the weather still calm (phew).

Still having no idea where the storm was, but the sense that she was about to come hurtling out of the gloom at us again, we went to bed (barometer still dropping, far lower than I've ever seen it go before). Sure enough, in bed with Osh (too scared to sleep on his own) the winds came at us again. Yesterday during the day they were battering the front of the house, once the eye has passed over, the winds come from the opposite direction so were slamming against the patio doors in the bedrooms. Even I was alarmed at the crashing and banging outside so we all snuck upstairs to sleep in the big bedroom.

I have truly never seen anything like it before - the wind was stirring the trees outside around like they were in a blender. It was awesome to watch (no chance of any sleep on account of the noise and trepidation that the doors were about to give way) but, this morning, now that the wind has dropped, I'm rather glad it's all over. Except that Ike is late for the party and is now running towards us....looks like Osh is going to have more days off school!

Veteran islanders are all a bit stunned at how we were 'caught out'. She was predicted to be a tropical storm, no-one knew until the last minute that she was going to be a hurricane or, more importantly that she'd sit on top of us for 36 hours (these things normally shift in about 6 hours) or almost turn back on herself!

Will keep you all posted. Suffice to say, we are all well, but very tired from lack of sleep.

Make that a Hurricane.....

Hanna has now been upgraded to a Hurricane. Gulp. She is waddling across the region at a painful 3mph (I can waddle faster than that) and, bizarrely, is now changing direction so that she is technically closer than she was before - rather than further away and it looks like we'll be putting up with this until Wednesday. The barometer continues to drop and we continue to be battered by rain and wind. And wind like I've never experienced before (as it were!). There was some hairy last minute plywood battening done as we realised that this thing was not doing as had been predicted (up a ladder in 70 mph winds is probably not recommended in the safety manual). We are all well, and I've just about managed to get supper cooked indoors (the power went out 30 mins ago and it looked like I was going to be chained to the bbq outside to prevent being blown away, or serving up corned beef and tinned cold potatoes!). More news as and when we get a connection.

Mim, it really isn't very pleasant outside.

About 6pm last night Ms Perez (headmistress) called to say that school was cancelled Monday morning. What wimps, I thought....it was a bit blowy outside, and there was some thunder and lightening around, but nowhere near the sort of weather I'd seen in Portsmouth. Needless to say Osh thought this was the best news ever. I then spent the rest of the night eating my hat (metaphorically, I hasten to add). Hanna visited her fury upon us at about 11 last night when all the power went out and the house has been lashed with 50 mph winds and immense quantities of rain ever since. The power finally came back on about 8am and I ran downstairs to make a cup of tea double quick - I didn't fancy having to shift the industrial sized bbq under the porch and then stand in a howling gale trying to boil water (I've done my share of camping, thank you). Or wake very tired husband and ask him to do same. The wind rattled and howled around the house all night banging the baffle on the airvent way up in the roof which resulted in neither of us getting much sleep. Osh, on the other hand, didn't come upstairs until about 4.30am - thank heavens for soundly sleeping children!

Hanna has now slowed down to a speed of 2mph...that is the speed she is moving over the ground rather than the wind speeds....which means we are forecast to have another couple of days of this. I've pasted above a satellite image from 8am this morning of the great lump - we are immediately below the white centre. The pressure is also dropping, and because she is now passing slowly over water she is picking up heat which could lead to her gaining strength. So today we are all stuck in doors mopping up water (pouring in through the doors, the window frames and the roof) BUT being grateful that we have power. Otherwise life would be a bit grim. Maybe my desire to be trapped indoors by a hurricane is no longer as great as it was...!