Dear Editor,
The last couple of days were very stressful for my family, thanks to Hurricane Ian. Ian was two miles per hour short of a cat-5 hurricane when it made landfall in Fort Meyers, Florida, with 155mph winds and gusts of 190mph. Why Fort Meyers, I thought. That’s exactly where my daughter and my son-in-law live. Having been born and bred in St. Maarten, she is from a young age well accustomed to hurricane-force winds and the damage they can do. But this was her first experience with a cat-5 hurricane. Ian was in fact the first-ever cat-5 to hit the State of Florida. It is now turning into the deadliest hurricane to hit Florida.
Living in an old wooden house – it seems that by far the majority of homes in the US are made of wood – beautiful in and out and outfitted with modern devices, but … made of 100% fragile wood.
To make things even worse, they were also under a tornado watch. Numerous tornados, brought on by the hurricane, were expected to hit the state. Add to that the fact that the media kept repeating over and over that it would certainly be a life-threatening event. In other words, they were predicting a lot of devastation and fatalities. And they were right, 77 deaths so far, at the time of this writing. Since search and rescue operations are still taking place, this number might increase. If that does not bring on a heap of anxiety and stress, I don’t know what would.
Since lots of families in St. Maarten have relatives living in Florida and other states, there are more of us locals who must have gone through this nightmare.
On the eve of the day of an approaching angry, disastrous and life-threatening hurricane, you go to bed exhausted after having done your utmost to “prepare” the wooden house, even putting sandbags in front of the doors – you hope to get at least a few hours of sleep, but you are fully aware that a sleepless night lies ahead.
What will tomorrow bring? You don’t know if you will lose your roof while you are asleep and have to run, where would you run to? If you run to a neighbor’s house and knock and cry out, they won’t hear you, because a hurricane makes a lot of noise. Perhaps you can sit out the rest of the hurricane in your car. We all know from experience that if the roof goes, everything in the house goes. You will have lost all your possessions.
As if the hurricane wasn’t bad enough, the weather stations were also warning that after the high winds had passed, the floods would follow which would produce even more damage than the hurricane-force winds. Great loss is also assured if your house is totally flooded with salty ocean water or dirty, muddy rainwater.
When you awake, will you be homeless? Will you still have a job? If your place of employment is ruined, you will almost surely be unemployed. How will you be able to pay your bills, and feed your family? All of these anxious thoughts go through your scared mind on the eve of a disastrous hurricane. The anxiety and stress levels can be crushing. The worst night of your life; one you will never ever forget.
At 10:00pm we learned via another family member in Miami that my daughter and her husband were okay because they “still had their roof”.
Since there was no way we could get in touch with her, we did the best thing we could do for her, we and all her cousins in St. Maarten and Curaçao prayed fervently and a lot.
God is good! He is a prayer-answering God. The only damage they suffered was a back porch that’s no longer there and a very messy yard with downed fruit trees. Not having water, electricity, Internet and phone service are very minor inconveniences now.
Seeing the extent of the devastation in Fort Meyers and the surrounding counties and states on TV makes me fully appreciate God’s goodness and mercy to my daughter and so many others in the US.
Clive Hodge
