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!