IRMA DEVASTATES CARIBBEAN’S TOURISM-DEPENDENT ECONOMY Sint Maarten is ‘95% destroyed’ as Atlantic storm cuts swath through region.Ivo and Chris Vickery had relished their Caribbean holiday on Sint Maarten, a paradise island of small coves and white sand beaches. Their eldest daughter had stayed in Brazil with relatives while five-year-old Gabi travelled with them. The family were due to return to New York on Wednesday. Then hurricane Irma hit.  At one point, as 185mph winds lashed the tiny island of 75,000 people, which is split into French and Dutch territories, the Vickerys had climbed into the bath tub for safety. Ms Vickery, who is no stranger to disaster as she met her husband while they were working in Haiti after its devastating 2010 earthquake, listened as the building shook, trying to figure out what was happening. “Was the wall about to come down?” she told the FT by telephone. “We were lucky. Our room has solid walls.” They were lucky indeed. Irma, the strongest-recorded Atlantic hurricane, has wreaked destruction this week as it ploughed north-west through the islands of the Caribbean. In its aftermath, homes remain submerged, cars floated down streets and boats have been tossed into messy piles around wrecked marinas, devastating the region’s tourism-dependent economies. “Ninety-five per cent of the island is destroyed,” Daniel Gibbs, chairman of one of Sint Maarten’s local councils, told Radio Caribbean International. “I’m in shock.” 

Remarkably, only 19 people are so far been confirmed dead. Four survivors are now sheltering with the Vickery family, having weathered the onslaught by hiding in a hotel cupboard, fortuitously reinforced because it contained a safe.  “Every local I’ve spoken to has lost their home and most have lost their jobs,” Ms Vickery says. “We managed to get food for a week but honestly it’s getting hard now.” Looting has reportedly started. Sint Maarten’s distress encapsulates conditions in the eastern Caribbean.

On private Necker Island, where British billionaire Richard Branson sheltered with staff in a concrete wine cellar, entire homes have been wiped out. The area is “completely devastated”,

he wrote in a tweet transmitted by satellite phone.  On Puerto Rico, which Irma clipped on Wednesday, three-quarters of the US territory’s 3.4m population was plunged into darkness by power outages, forcing more than half of its hospitals to close and compounding the near-bankrupt island’s financial difficulties.  The storm left cars and boats strewn about Saint Barthelemy, more commonly known as St Barts and a popular destination for wealthy Americans and Europeans. Buildings including fire and police stations have collapsed in the US Virgin Islands while four died and many houses were destroyed in the British Virgin Islands. The Bahamas, which expects 20ft storm surges, moved thousands to the capital Nassau in its biggest storm evacuation to date. After ravaging the Turks and Caicos, the Category 5 hurricane is predicted to strike Cuba and the Bahamas. Cuba has evacuated 36,000 tourists, mostly Canadians, from its northern tourist complex Los Cayos. Haiti, which is still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Matthew — then counted the most powerful Caribbean hurricane in a decade — may also yet suffer flooding. Irma is expected to strike the southern US state of Florida this weekend, two weeks after Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, leaving at least 60 dead and causing $180bn of damage.  Despite Irma’s savagery, the massive hurricane is only a grim reminder of the Caribbean’s vulnerability to storms and floods. Damage from hurricanes — a word derived from Huracán, the Mayan deity of wind and fire who caused a great flood after humans angered the Gods — costs its states more than 2 per cent of gross domestic product annually. Some, like Irma, are devastating. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan caused $6bn of damage across 10 countries, with Grenada among the worst-hit. It claimed 39 lives on an island of 100,000, caused $800m of damage and left the country’s premier homeless. On a US scale, that would be equivalent to almost 126,000 deaths, $18tn of damage and a flattened White House.  The IMF has estimated that on current trends, climate change could increase by as much as 77 per cent the storm cost to the Caribbean by 2100, with even “the mildest of scenarios involved” a rise of 11 per cent.  Despite debate over whether global warming causes more storms, scientists agree that future warming would make storms stronger and wetter. Irma has gained strength as it passes over water that is up to 1 degree Celsius warmer than normal. Meanwhile, tropical hurricanes José and Katia have formed out at sea, while a powerful magnitude 8.2 earthquake also struck off the western shoreline of southern Mexico on Thursday night, reportedly leaving 15 dead and prompting a tsunami warning. Katia, with maximum winds of 80mph, is in the Gulf of Mexico heading towards the southeast Mexico coast, while José, tracking behind Irma, has been upgraded to a category 4 storm with winds of 150mph.  “Our flight out has been cancelled . . . and there’s a new hurricane headed this way,” Ms Vickery said. “We don’t know when we can fly out.”