Devastation in the Caribbean as Hurricane Irma Heads Toward Miami
Two residents from St. Martin island’s two nations, the French St. Martin and the Dutch St. Maarten, describe Irma’s destruction.
“Help will arrive tonight,” she said, “but for the moment, they don’t have anything.”
The nearby island of St. Barthélemy, another French territory, was also hard hit, as
was Barbuda, where half of the island’s residents were reportedly left homeless.
Among the deepest concerns of Mr. McKendrick, the Anguilla attorney general, was the approach of Hurricane Jose, declared
a Category 3 storm on Thursday, which is expected to make its way through this same part of the Caribbean on Saturday.
A Hurricane Watch was in effect for Antigua and Barbuda
and a Tropical Storm watch was issued for Anguilla, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Saba and St. Eustatius
On St. Martin, a part-French, part-Dutch possession where at least four people died as a result of the storm,
aerial footage taken by the military showed streets inundated with water and homes devastated by winds.
“There are shipwrecks everywhere, destroyed houses everywhere, torn-off roofs everywhere,” the president
of the French territorial council on St. Martin, Daniel Gibbs, told Radio Caraïbes International.
Government officials in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina pleaded for people to evacuate vulnerable areas, triggering a scramble for the essentials — gasoline, water, sandbags — that, even for hurricane-hardened Floridians, was laced with dread
and punctuated with dire warnings from every direction.