Hurricanes Irma and Maria both hit the U.S. Virgin Islands in September as Category 5 storms, but the devastation there has been largely overshadowed by the damage and death this year's hurricane season left behind in Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean nations.
In the U.S. Virgin Islands, a territory with just 103,000 residents, more than 33,000 individuals and families have applied for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and government agencies reported Thursday that 73 percent of customers still had no power. The storms so denuded the islands' lush vegetation that where they once showed up in satellite photos as green jewels in the sea, they were brown after the hurricanes passed.
Gov. Kenneth Mapp said Thursday at a news conference that he would go to Washington this week to request $7 billion in aid. After taking a group of senators on a tour of the destruction, he said in a statement earlier last week, "It is so critical that Congress sees firsthand the challenges we face in rebuilding our infrastructure."
For two months, Kimmeiqua Mahoney; her husband, Shawn Mathurin; and their three children tried to tough it out in their waterlogged apartment on St. Thomas, without electricity, trying in vain to keep things clean. But they gave up and moved last week to a home where the power is on.
Mahoney, 25, was eight months pregnant when Irma ripped away their home's doors and windows, allowing the blast of rain into their former apartment. It was as if someone aimed a fire hose at everything inside and left it running for hours, she said; two weeks later, Maria turned the hose on again.
They have replaced or boarded over the openings, but the walls inside are "still wet to the touch," she said. "The bathroom roof is falling apart. There's a lot of mold, greenish and bluish, coming out of the walls."
Nearly everything they owned was ruined. An outer wall of their apartment, in a building in the Tutu High Rise Community, shifted in one of the storms, so the rooms flood anew with each rainfall. Their only way to cook was on a campfire, and with no refrigeration, they had to be careful to buy only as much food as they could prepare and eat each day. Across the islands, mosquitoes and flies proliferate in the standing water and rotting garbage, and like many people, Mahoney, unable to close her home to the elements, worries about a disease outbreak.
Now, she has an added worry, an infant to care for -- Trinity Luisa Mathurin, born in a hospital Oct. 19.
The baby's arrival helped convince the parents that they had to move, Mahoney said, "because it's not sanitary."
The storms hit Cibone, a restaurant in the historic district of Frederiksted, on St. Croix, so hard that the owners, Almitra and Gregory Richards, have not even been able to assess the damage.
"The landlord has workers in there making sure it's structurally sound," Almitra Richards said. "Until then, we can't even get in to see if the equipment is OK and start serious cleanup. I think we can scrub down the furniture and salvage it, but we don't really know yet."
Like thousands of other structures on the islands, the restaurant's damaged roof is covered with a blue tarp. At least some buildings in the historic district still do not have electricity, their tenants said.
When Irma blew past, Cibone lost power and the food spoiled, so the staff threw it all away, cleaned, and stocked up with fresh supplies. Then it happened again with Maria.
Almitra Richards, 38, said they have no idea when they might be able to reopen, but the restaurant is not their biggest concern.
Maria peeled the carport and part of the roof off their nearby house and filled it with water.
"I tried salvaging our clothes, and I got my son's diploma, but almost everything else is gone," she said. "The mold is pretty bad, so we wear masks when we go in there."
The family is staying with relatives and trying to figure out how to pay for home repairs.
A Section on 11/12/2017