CARRIACOU, Grenada — On July 1, Beryl smacked into Carriacou, a tiny island of Grenada, as a high-end Category 4 storm. It jumped to Category 5 — the top tier for a hurricane — when it intensified rapidly back in the Eastern Caribbean Sea. During the time it swirled around Carriacou and its smaller sister island, Petite Martinique, Beryl brought sustained winds of 150 miles an hour as residents cowered in their homes while the tirade went on for several hours.
Beryl then passed just south of Jamaica as a Category 4 on July 3 and weakened further before making a second landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula as a high-end category 2 hurricane early on July 5.
“This lady is a wicked lady,” said Lennox Corion, a taxi driver and resident of Carriacou, population approximately 8,000, as if Beryl were still knocking around nearly two months later. He took us from the town’s port, where we arrived by a two-hour ferry on the open sea from St. George’s, the mainland capital, to the government command center on the far side of Carriacou.
There, the temporary camp of the National Disaster Management Agency, or Nadma, sat atop a hill overlooking the ocean, harmless-seeming on a Saturday in late August.
The ferry had been packed, including with Carriacou residents checking on their homes and property while they continued to stay on the mainland. A nurse who was living temporarily in an apartment she rents in St. George’s, where she works as a nurse, called the hurricane “a real mashup.” Her house is standing, at least the concrete sections, but rebuilding will be slow and expensive.
“I still have a washroom,” she noted, repeating a bright spot in the disaster as many Carriacou folks did in interviews with PassBlue.
This article is part of our series on how small states use the multilateral system of the United Nations to their benefit.
Regardless of the boundless sunshine, Carriacou looked like it was barely progressing from a center of destruction to a rebuilding phase — lingering in relief-and-early-recovery limbo. The Osprey ferry from the mainland dropped off not only residents but also international volunteers ready to pitch in, including two humanitarians from the Secours Populaire Français charity. The ferry was also loaded with goods like sacks of sugar (from Honduras and Colombia), bottled water and electronics.
The immediate scene on Carriacou resembled a war zone without the heavy weapons and bloodshed. (Reportedly, four people died from Beryl in Grenada.) Large boats lay on their sides in the marshy end of the port’s harbor; blue-tarp roofs covered buildings throughout the 13-square-mile island. Sheets of galvanized metal sheared off from rooftops were wrapped on gnarled trees like abstract sculptures.
Hanging utility wires recalled cooked spaghetti. Plywood walls had been tossed by Beryl to the ground randomly. A silent eeriness pervaded the port, where a temporary warehouse of the World Food Program was being used as a main distribution point.
Across the street, a large supermarket was nearly empty of customers but stocked with essentials, including Grenadian-made chocolate bars and Grenadian-made ice cream. People who could not stay in their homes but have remained on the island have been sheltering in its stadium in Hillsborough, the big town; or in schools, with friends or other informal places.
An immediate plan of the government is to reopen schools as it’s the time of year, so people camping in shelters will need to find new spots to live or return to their homes, if possible.
Beryl broke a record. Category 5 storms in the Atlantic — technically, tropical cyclones — are relatively rare but when they occur, they can leave catastrophic damage in their wake. They usually happen in the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico in September. But Beryl was recorded as being the earliest Category 5 in the Atlantic hurricane season, supplanting Hurricane Emily in 2005, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Near-record ocean temperatures in the region and the likely development of La Niña later this summer are being attributed to Beryl’s record-breaking feats. Current sea surface temperatures are akin to those of mid-September, the peak of the hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. Experts say that the Beryl-forming conditions enabled the storm to intensify quickly because of climate change.
The pace of ocean-warming has been accelerating in the last two decades, according to a new report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. Scientists expect the upper-meters of oceans to continue to warm due to excess heat that has been accumulating across the earth from global warming.
Yet, Beryl’s record-breaking is not something people on Carriacou talk about much right now. They want to get their roofs back over their heads, gutters reinstalled to collect rainwater in cisterns as fresh water remains in short supply, find plywood to rebuild walls, ensure electricity stays on and put their lives back in one piece. The islanders have enough food, provided through donors like the World Central Kitchen and the World Food Program, and even cellphone links from the new arrival of Starlink terminals.
How are you managing? PassBlue asked Shelly Quamma, as she stood alone in the shell of her kitchen, looking through the glassless window above the sink straight to the sea.
“I’m coping well, O.K.?” she said, shrugging. She and her two boys are living at her workplace nearby, but that may not last as her sons need to go back to school.
When asked what she wanted from the government, she said, “Material to build back the house.” Although she filled out the form for assistance, she hasn’t heard back from the authorities.
“I experienced a hurricane already” — Ivan, a Category 5 in September 2004 — she said as the wind broke up her words and she seemed ready to cry about Beryl. “So, I know what it was like. It was a bad experience for them children. They cry and didn’t feel pleased about it.” The hurricane hit at 11 o’clock in the morning on July 1 and left by three.
The nastiness of Ivan was not forgotten by Grenadians overall, but it was more destructive on the mainland, where one resident recalled that its aftermath resembled an atomic-bomb attack. Beryl left a more vicious trail on Carriacou and Petite Martinique.
Grenada is about 100 miles north of Venezuela, but its closest neighbors in the Eastern Caribbean are Trinidad and Tobago and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, part of which was also hit by Beryl. Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth, is a mountainous island and the second-largest producer of nutmeg in the world, after Indonesia, which most Grenadians will tell you the moment they meet you. The face of Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell, 46, is visible on billboards throughout the country.
A symbol of a nutmeg is part of the country’s flag, and the Parliament’s oval-shaped interior resembles the nut’s insides. The big-leaf trees may be nondescript, but the spice is lucrative and finds its way into native dishes. Cinnamon is also grown plentifully, as well as cocoa.
The country grows nutmeg mostly through cooperatives and individual farms. Beryl’s damage to the mainland was concentrated primarily in the north, where nutmeg trees were also felled by the storm. Farmers have complained that they can’t replant the trees, so the government is said to be stepping in with subsidies, one large grower told PassBlue.
Corion, the Carriacou taxi driver, drove us the 45 minutes to the Nadma base, pointing out the damage along the way, including his relatively intact home. The low-lying roads wound along the coast and up the island’s hills as people wandered about doing chores to get their lives back on track. We passed through Hillsborough, the heart of Carriacou, where small restaurants and shops buzzed, despite the shirt-dripping humidity and devastation around them, including the island’s stadium and its airport. Through it all, the “men are still drinking rum,” Corion, like a mayor, noted.
Government warnings let Grenadians know that she was heading their way, but “some people didn’t have time to move” because she whipped up so fast, he said.
Given the vulnerability of Carriacou — and the probability that a storm like Beryl could reappear because of global warming trends — why does Corion live in such a remote place? “I love it — everything,” he said, honking at people he knew, which was everyone. “There’s less crime, you can leave your door open. I’ve lived here all my life.”
At first, do-gooders descended on the island, including the UN. But as Rogerio Mobilia, the director of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for the Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a phone interview, now is the time to check on the residents, after many of the humanitarian groups have gone.
An OCHA team arrived at the Nadma camp on July 5 to help organize such basic needs for the islanders as power, water and health care, he said. Mobilia said that there were “many difficulties” coordinating aid at first. By Aug. 5, living conditions had improved.
He suggested that PassBlue contact the UN country coordinator in Grenada, Feona Sandy, for current details on who’s delivering aid, but she said in an email that she was not authorized to talk to media and referred us to the regional office in Barbados. The office referred us back to Sandy.
Additionally, despite repeated attempts to talk to Grenada’s ambassador to the UN, Ché Phillip, PassBlue was told he was too busy for an interview, given that the UN General Assembly annual opening debate is taking place soon.
We spotted a Samaritan’s Purse charity setup on Carriacou as well as World Central Kitchen, but they have since left, according to Terence Walters, the head of Nadma. The World Food Program’s temporary warehouse in Carriacou is run by two local women who oversee the distribution of goods to various spots on the island. The items include disposable diapers, bottled water, foam mattresses and dried food. There was plenty sitting in the warehouse.
Near the Nadma base, the remains of concrete and wooden houses stood ghostlike as the people who lived in them had moved to shelters or to the mainland. Carriacou is a fishing town and a tourist spot, like much of Grenada. But there were no places to stay on the island for visitors in late August.
Dominic Lawrence, a resident and a security guard at Nadma, was about to go off duty. He said his house had no roof, which also means no water. “I need plywood, galvanizing and wood” to rebuild. Cement, the most-preferred material, is not available.
The Nadma base featured a warehouse full of more goods for distribution, an outdoor kitchen to feed volunteers and staffers — that day, they were serving chicken and rice cooked by a Hillsborough chef — and a field of new air-conditioned tents for humanitarian aid workers. Goats grazed on the grass.
Bernice Date, a Carriacouan, is the communications program officer for Nadma. Although she lost her home and business, a clothing boutique, in the hurricane, she has stayed put. Beryl, she said, “was worse than I thought it would be.”
“All communications failed,” she added, including links to the mainland. Families spent days trying to find one another. Contact tracing lasted weeks. Older people on Carriacou were sent to the mainland. “Everyone is affected.”
“Our biggest problem is trying to get 168 people from shelters and get water,” she said. “We want to reopen schools in late September.” ShelterBox, a private donor, is giving Carriacou 600 tents “to people who need them.”
The Great Nutmeg
Nutmeg farms populate northern Grenada’s mainland, and some growers who were struck by Beryl continue to deal with the aftermath. Nutmeg is said to have arrived from Indonesia to Grenada in 1843. It has flourished since.
“We use everything in nutmeg,” Carl Bohla, another well-informed taxi driver, said. “Jam, syrup, as a lipstick base. The shell is used as mulch.” The red, waxy coating of the nut, called mace, resembles lace. Grenada, known as the “spice island,” also grows cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, cloves and vanilla bean.
L’Esterre Estate Organics cocoa and nutmeg farm is a family-run business in St. Andrews, in the northeast. It has been owned by the Ramdhannys for 75 years. Patricia Neptune is the manager of the 200-year-old estate, and she showed us around parts of the 70-acre farm wearing a large-brimmed canvas hat to shield her from the intense sun.
Beryl pulled lots of the nutmeg and cocoa trees down, she said, leading us through groves. Seventy percent of the farm’s crops are gone from the hurricane, and the farm crew is still clearing the debris.
“We replanted some trees at a higher level last week,” Neptune said, accompanied by her granddaughter, Tianna, who ate the cocoa pods raw. The government may subsidize the planting of new trees, according to Neptune. The farm processes the cocoa beans to sell to the local cooperative and beyond. Some of the farm’s outbuildings date to 1817. (An original barrack housed the estate’s slaves.)
“Beryl chewed on everything,” Neptune said, offering raw cocoa nibs to taste: chocolatey but hardly sweet.
The prime minister’s office is overseeing the next stage — recovery and reconstruction — of Beryl’s effects, working with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA, part of Caricom), Walters of Nadma said. Housing and access to fresh water are priorities, as well as getting building materials to residents. Walters is focusing on tying up the loose ends of the relief phase, or as he called it, “preparedness and response.” (The prime minister’s office did not respond to an email from PassBlue by deadline.)
Walters’ office, located in the quiet neighborhood of Mourne Jaloux on the mainland, offers sweeping views of Grenada’s green countryside. Under an outdoor canopy, more aid was waiting: goods from USAID and Irish Aid and sacks of sugar from Jamaica. A crew from the World Food Program and others were eating lunch in the shade.
“Most of the UN agencies that have come in, they’ve done what they had to do, in terms of the relief,” Walters said. “So, they’re basically looking now into the whole recovery efforts.” He didn’t give details, saying it was the prime minister’s office to do so.
“I’m certain the UN agencies will be engaged . . . to provide assistance to the recovery and rehabilitation.” CDEMA will have a primary role in the next steps, he added. He didn’t know how much longer the World Food Program would stay in Grenada or who was the agency’s point person there.
On the taxi drive back to St. George’s, the car radio broadcast a press briefing with Walters that was held earlier in the day. He was talking about how the “recording process” of relief items going to Grenada or straight to Carriacou and Petite Martinique “can become a challenge,” citing how items can be “damaged” or “separated” along the distribution path, hence the need for more training of Nadma workers. That role would fall to the World Food Program.
The goal was to enhance the transparency of record-keeping, Walters said, because “we do understand rumors can fly.”
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Dulcie Leimbach is a co-founder, with Barbara Crossette, of PassBlue. For PassBlue and other publications, Leimbach has reported from New York and overseas from West Africa (Burkina Faso and Mali) and from Europe (Scotland, Sicily, Vienna, Budapest, Kyiv, Armenia, Iceland, The Hague and Cyprus). She has provided commentary on the UN for BBC World Radio, ARD German TV and Radio, NHK’s English channel, Background Briefing with Ian Masters/KPFK Radio in Los Angeles and the Foreign Press Association.
Previously, she was an editor for the Coalition for the UN Convention Against Corruption; from 2008 to 2011, she was the publications director of the United Nations Association of the USA. Before UNA, Leimbach was an editor at The New York Times for more than 20 years. She began her reporting career in small-town papers in San Diego, Calif., and graduating to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Leimbach has been a fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies as well as at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; taught news reporting at Hofstra University; and guest-lectured at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the CUNY Journalism School. She graduated from the University of Colorado and has an M.F.A. in writing from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
