Surveying the Damage

Slowly the storm abated. The four of us climbed up to Alex’s room for a better view. It was unnerving to look out to sea and find that the water continued uninterrupted right past the house and far behind.

We saw, to our horror, that hurricane-shattered shards of glass had slashed Alex’s mosquito net to shreds and littered the bed where he had slept until almost the moment when his windows blew in.

From the empty window frames in the dormers we saw that Lia and Tom Tattersfield’s house next door was still standing, safe on its high stilts, although the front steps had been torn away. Most of the walls enclosing the ground-floor area that had housed their maid Ella, Tom’s workshop, and the car, had washed away. Water poured out of the windows of Ella’s room, two inches from their top. The fence was gone.

Looking behind our house, we saw that the older, smaller houses were shifted, sagging, or down completely. Almost every roof in sight was gashed open or gone. Debris was everywhere.

Incongruously perched in the newly denuded branches of our huge old mango tree was a scarlet macaw who had escaped from a cage somewhere. His feathers were slightly ruffled, but his long tail swept down in brilliant scarlet, blue, and green glory and he looked out over the water as if it were his sovereign realm. The same tree held a 1″ x 4″ board, split half its length, impaled on a branch.

We were marooned. Both our front and back steps were gone.

Throughout the storm, rain had poured through our living room ceiling and the wind had screamed through the doors. However, a large table lamp and a floor lamp still stood solidly in place, unmoved by the chaos that had raged around them. Late in the afternoon a gentle zephyr from an opened door laid them both flat.

A bowl of flowers on the dining room table, in a direct line with the wind, was undisturbed, except that the bowl overflowed with rainwater.

By the time the wind dropped to gale force, rain no longer blew into the house. Our first task was to sweep out several inches of muddy water. I used a push broom to shove it down the back steps while Bucher and Alex attended to blinds, blown-in windows, and broken glass.

By early afternoon we decided to leave our stair-less house to explore the neighborhood. We slid awkwardly down the back banister and found ourselves in knee-deep water. Our carefully donned rubber boots instantly had as much water inside as out.

Poor Juanita’s flat on the floor below us was demolished. Fortunately the whole family had gone to Mexico and had missed the hurricane. Water had knocked out doors and windows, crushed sections of wall, torn off siding, and even pulled up sections of flooring. Furniture, lamps, and bric-a-brac appeared to have been stirred by a remorseless mixer. The toilet had torn loose from the bathroom, washed out of that room, into the adjacent bedroom, and had blasted out through the bedroom wall, leaving a huge, round hole. Their veranda had vanished.

Bucher waded through the roiling water to examine each of the supports of the house with an engineer’s eye. The posts were upright, intact, and undamaged. Everything that had been on the ground level was gone—picketing, locked rooms, Alex’s skiff, the children’s bikes, and all of Juanita and Tuto’s things. However, somebody else’s boat and outboard motor were snugly parked in Juanita’s side of the storage area, berthed by a storm with a sense of humor.

Of about twenty-three houses along the Southern Foreshore, only about six were standing and habitable. Ours was one. Bucher explained to the children that when every door and window was boarded up, a house literally could explode because, during the storm, the air pressure outside dropped below the pressure within the house.

Entire facades were ripped away from some homes so that we could look in as if they were doll houses. Some of the finest-looking homes were the worst damaged. One Foreshore house that had lost its third story in the 1931 hurricane lost its second in Hurricane Hattie. It was repaired later as a one-story house on stilts. Several houses disappeared completely, leaving nothing to show where they had been but a few inches of stubby columns or an empty concrete slab.

We walked south on the Foreshore to our brick Cathedral of St. John’s, site last century of the coronations of three kings of the Miskito tribe. The interior was a shambles—altar, pews, lectern, and floorboards mixed up with colorful shards of stained glass. The floor next to the open side door was jacked up to waist height. Water swirled underneath. I had to climb into the Church and slide down the ramp of flooring to get inside. Only the walls were familiar. The marble tablets mounted in memory of people who had died dozens of decades earlier remained, stained but intact.

When we returned to our house, we shinnied painfully back up the banister and assessed the situation.

We were safe. We had more-or-less intact living quarters. We had a gas stove with a cylinder of fuel in use and a spare on hand that should last for a while, plus a kerosene stove for emergencies. We had kerosene lanterns, candles, and flashlights. The toilet still worked and there was a sea full of water a few steps away to supply flushing water. Convenience was not at issue; sanitation was. The children helped to “back” (carry) sea water without protest.

The clean water that we had saved in the washing machine and bathtub had to suffice for drinking and cooking. We taught the children to take a refreshing bath with half a saucepan of water, standing on a towel. Our dish-washing practices would not have won medals at a health conference. Dirty water was saved to be reused for successively less-vital purposes.

Both our cupboards and our refrigerator were stocked adequately for our immediate needs. Three days later we still had a bit of ice. The family was delighted at the rapid series of fine meals served them due to the need to use frozen meat quickly.

There was no electricity and we knew that there would be none for the foreseeable future. Radio and telephone communications were cut. A few ham radio operators were getting news out. Locally, news circulated so efficient that it seemed like a strange psychic ability to pass messages without aid from science.