At the beginning of September 2017 hurricane Irma swept across the Caribbean, carving a path of destruction from Barbuda to the Bahamas as it pounded everything in its path with sustained winds of 180 mph and gusts in excess of 220 mph. First making landfall in Barbuda late in the evening of Tuesday 5 September, it knocked down all measuring instruments on the island—recordings from an anemometer placed on a buoy near the coast peaked at 155 mph before going offline, but the full force of the hurricane as it ravished the land could not be firmly established. Not that it really matters, for the true scope of this storm could not be measured in miles or millibar.
Soon after Irma had cleared Antigua and Barbuda, Prime Minister Gaston Browne announced triumphantly that the island had passed with flying colours the test presented by the most powerful atmospheric system ever recorded in the basin. He’d spoken too soon. Antigua had indeed withstood the hurricane without major damage, but it had also been spared the brunt of the beating as the thirty- to thirty-five-mile eye of the freak storm passed directly over Barbuda, forty miles north of Antigua.
With all telecommunications systems down, Mr Browne announced he would fly out to ascertain the damage on Barbuda as soon as the conditions allowed it. There was urgency in his message, but there was no alarm. It soon became obvious, however, that what was meant as a gesture of solidarity and support would turn into a reconnaissance flight over a disaster area: Barbuda had been flattened to the ground, and with hurricane Jose following quick on Irma’s footsteps a compulsory evacuation order was put in place. Two nights later, on 7 September 2017, Barbuda remained uninhabited for the first time since 1666. For context, that was the same year Saint Paul’s Cathedral was consumed by the Great Fire of London, in the days of the Restoration under Charles II and in the midst of the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
Back to the 21st century, Barbudans were forced to spend twenty-two days in exile, while civil servants cleared the debris from the roads, restored telephone lines, fogged the island for pest control, and made the hospital operational. Only on Friday 29 September were the first of Barbuda’s 1,800 residents allowed to head back to their homes—and though they returned to an inhospitable land where there wouldn’t be any electricity or running water for many months to come, still the date remains in the annals of history as the moment the island was finally re-settled, the day the process of recovery from hurricane Irma could start in earnest.
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Though worlds apart, St. Martin and Anguilla are inexorably joined, like Siamese twins, by the calamities that from time to time befall them. The benchmark, up to now, had always been hurricane Donna, a category 4 storm that in 1960 caused catastrophic damage to St. Martin and changed the history of Anguilla; both islands were again badly hit by hurricane Luis in 1995, and in 1999 hurricane Lenny unexpectedly stalled its progress through the archipelago roughly in between them, dumping a tremendous amount of rain over the following two days. In 2014 Gonzalo, a category 4 hurricane that had barely reached category 1 as it made its way from Antigua towards the northeast Caribbean, gathered momentum just as it was leaving St. Martin behind, treating locals to stronger winds and a lot more rain than had been predicted.
Unlike Gonzalo, Irma took no one by surprise. In French Saint-Martin the recently elected president of the colectivité, Daniel Gibbs, asked for assistance even before the storm hit. The central government responded by sending a team of one hundred individuals, mainly healthcare professionals and soldiers, to set up mobile medical centres and safeguard peace in the aftermath of the hurricane. The Dutch government also sent assistance by boat, arrived from Aruba and Curaçao, though given the state of the sea in the advent of Irma, landing the contingent proved a problem. Somehow, however, one gets the feeling that any level of preparedness would ultimately have been insufficient to face the mighty wreckage that was about to ensue.
Irma’s eye was so large that on Wednesday 6 September at approximately 7.30 in the morning it encompassed Anguilla and St Martin at the same time. By then both islands had been plunged into darkness for several hours. The electric company in Dutch Sint Maarten, GEBE, cut the service at approximately 5 am—that’s when most radio stations on the island went quiet, with the exception of Laser 101 which continued broadcasting intermittently.
Across the strait, Radio Anguilla covered the developing situation through the night, until its signal failed in the morning. There had been no power on Anguilla since 3 am, and one of the two local mobile phone providers, Digicel, lost its network before dawn. Miraculously, the other telecommunications company, FLOW, managed to keep connectivity throughout the passage of the storm, enabling young Radio Anguilla broadcaster and future Miss Anguilla Nisha Dupuis to continue reporting live on Periscope as the situation unfolded.
At the same time, a number of self-styled storm watchers kept posting on Facebook and other social media videos of the latest developments. There were palm trees bending over backwards and Jeep bonnets jerked open by the wind, there were hurricane shutters being blown and leaks encroaching on every corner of supposedly “safe” rooms, but the most striking scene came from a resident seeking shelter above his kitchen counter, witnessing a huge body of water tear through his front door and well up to alarmingly dangerous levels before it ripped open the back door and streamed out of the house.Through the darkest night in its recent history, Anguilla managed to stay wired, to stay in touch with the world.
This might not have made things better, but at least they made them known. Nothing, however, could have prepared Anguillans for the devastation they would witness once the all clear was given and people started venturing outside. Every light pole was down, every tree had been stripped of all its leaves, cars were piled on top of each other, wooden houses reduced to rubble, as if hit squarely by tornado, even concrete structures—cracked, slanted, felled.
In St. Martin the situation was even worse, as the topography of the island makes it more vulnerable to flash flooding, especially at the foot of the hills. To further compound matters, widespread looting was reported on both the French and Dutch sides, adding a social element to a situation that already was extremely delicate. With a strict curfew in place and more than four hundred Dutch marines temporarily stationed on Sint Maarten, though, the rule of law was soon restored.
Over the following days the ordinary list of celebrities visiting the region was replaced by a Who’s Who of political figures making the rounds: King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands arrived in Sint Maarten as soon as the situation was deemed sufficiently safe, and President Macron was photographed assessing the damage and shaking hands with the injured at the hospital in French Saint-Martin. Meanwhile, on the other side of the channel it was Boris Johnson who paraded his scraggy blond locks on a brief visit to Anguilla, before continuing to the Virgin Islands. The eyes of the world were all pointing to the right place, just for the wrong reason.
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The year 2017 was meant to be one of celebration and remembrance in Anguilla, as the island commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 revolution, a haphazard, gutsy and altogether unlikely revolt that extirpated the territory out of an unwanted union with the state of St. Kitts and Nevis, and that ultimately paved the way for Anguilla to return to the British colonial fold. In some sense, the story of the Anguilla Revolution begins with another, somewhat less powerful but equally wrathful storm: hurricane Donna, which in 1960 razed the island to the ground. Except, when Donna whisked through the region there was remarkably little to destroy in Anguilla. The roads were unpaved and electricity was an extravagance available only to those with a generator, there were no hospitals, the airport was a small building next to a dusty strip of dirt and tarmac (only the first few hundred yards were paved), and the full extent of the telephone network consisted of fourteen interconnected lines.
And yet, all this little was blown out of existence by hurricane Donna. Living in St. Martin at the time was Ronald Webster, the future leader of the revolution and the single most influential person in the history of Anguilla. Mr. Webster’s own rise from abject poverty to abundant wealth is the stuff of novels, but it meant that he was in a position to do something about the destitution he saw in Anguilla when he first returned after Donna. A fervently religious man, by his own admission Mr. Webster felt that Donna had been, to some extent, his fault for it had been God’s vehicle to deliver a message to him. That message was not only to help his relatives and loved ones but in fact to permanently improve living conditions in his homeland. Mr. Webster knew from that moment that change was needed, and though he didn’t really know how to bring it about he was absolutely determined to achieve it. That determination, combined with the financial means to endorse it, proved key as Anguilla successfully untied the bond with St. Kitts that for almost 150 years had kept it shackled to despondency.
In Anguilla, the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution focused as much on celebrating the glorious deeds of past heroes as it did on exploring different ways in which the progress witnessed in the island over the last half century could be furthered in the immediate future. That is what made the timing of hurricane Irma so frighteningly eerie. As Anguillans had been revisiting and extolling the events that led, quite literally, to the forging of their nation, the island was suddenly swept back to a condition many thought would never again apply to Anguilla. Therein lies the nuance of their situation: it’s not that Anguilla had never known so much desolation—it had, in fact, and more recently than most other places—but Anguillans had never lost so much, simply because they had never enjoyed so much prosperity either. The ability to bounce back from loss is not the same as the ability to make the most of a basic existence, but that is precisely the challenge Anguillans faced.
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The days and weeks following the passage of hurricane Irma were entirely spent in the affected islands rescuing victims and accounting for losses, restoring peace and distributing essentials, ensuring public health, minimizing risk and reactivating the economy. A cursory look at the situation shortly after the stage of rescue and relief, though, is enough to understand that these territories were faced with transformation, not just reconstruction. In Barbuda no more than a few hundred locals were allowed back to the island at the end of September, and they were confronted with nothing short of a post-apocalyptic landscape. In St. Martin it took until 7 October for the general curfew to be lifted. By that time half of the island was back on the power grid, while running water was restored to approximately sixty percent of the population. Meanwhile, the international Princess Juliana Airport, a key regional hub, was partially reopened on 10 October—on the seventh anniversary of Dutch Sint Maarten becoming a separate constituent country of the Kingdom of Netherlands. The concurrence wasn’t serendipitous: in St. Martin, like in Anguilla and Barbuda, the sensation that they were being entrusted with the rebirth of the nation was filled with more than just symbolic meaning.
In Anguilla, the immensity of the task at hand was best illustrated by the efforts of the local electric company, Anglec, to restore service: having worked 14-hour shifts for 25 consecutive days and even with the assistance of delegations from Barbados and St. Lucia, by the end of September Anglec had only managed to plug six percent of the island’s network back onto the grid. Six percent. The arrival of Canadian linesmen in November brought renewed impetus to the recovery plan, and Anguilla was able to bring back substantial sections of the island onto the power grid by Christmas, yet initial predictions suggesting it would take four to six months to restore normality on the island proved to be rather on the optimistic side.
For one, the geography of Anguilla, of St. Martin, of Barbuda and the rest of the islands hit by hurricane Irma had been irreversibly transformed. In St. Martin, for instance, the famous strip of restaurants in Grand Case, a charming lane of seaside establishments that over the years has earned a reputation as one of the best culinary experiences not only on the island but in the entire region, had all but vanished. The surge produced by Irma quite literally gobbled up Grand Case’s seashore, leaving behind little more than memories. Tragic as that was, it paled in comparison with the effects of Irma on Barbuda, where ninety-five percent of the buildings were irreparably damaged.
In Anguilla in late September or October, even through November and most of December 2017 a drive down The Road from South Hill to Sandy Ground would tell you all you needed to know about the situation: despite the electric company’s best efforts, the island’s most popular strip of nighttime entertainment remained firmly off the grid, poles leaning left and right in a guard of honour of sorts. For all the devastation evident along The Road, though, the most striking portrait of the mess Irma left behind was, quite possibly, the least evident to the untrained eye, for it wasn’t articulated around invasive and perfectly visible elements such as rubble. Instead, it revealed itself in the eerie form of absence, in the immaterial yet perfectly evident emptiness that replaced the building that once stood there, that seemingly always had been there, a landmark that everyone knew, yet that wasn’t there anymore: The Pumphouse.
Ask anyone who has had any dealings with Anguilla in the last twenty years and they’ll know The Pumphouse for what it’s been all this time—the island’s favorite nightlife venue. From the moment the historical building was turned into a bar, back in the mid 1990s, The Pumphouse grew in stature at a staggering pace, quickly complementing and eventually replacing Johnno’s, also in Sandy Ground, as the place to while away the Anguillian night. Long before the pump house became The Pumphouse, however, the building already had played a significant role in the lives (and livelihood) of Anguillians in general and people from Sandy Ground in particular, as the nerve centre of the island’s salt industry.
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Anguilla’s saltpans have almost certainly been exploited since the seventeenth century, though the first Anguilla Salt Ponds Joint Stock Company wasn’t founded until 1855. For centuries salt reaping in Anguilla was conducted with no interference of the natural process, whereby the basins would be flooded periodically by seawater which would subsequently be evaporated by the sun, creating a sheet of salt which had to be pierced and picked from the bottom of the pond to be transported over flat barges to dry land. It would be Wager Rey, originally from St. Martin, who would deploy a system of stone dams all around the Road Salt Pond to regulate the levels of seawater and keep rainwater from diluting the brine. Wager’s son, Carter would further develop the mechanism and install a diesel pump to drive the rainwater out of the lagoon, as well as a mill to grind the salt rocks down to grains. In order to protect this valuable machinery from the elements, and to provide shelter to those cleaning, preparing, grinding, and packing the salt, the wooden pump house was built, probably sometime in the 1920s. Those were not buoyant times for Anguilla, but the salt industry—with the pump house at its core—provided a rare economic lifeline on an island where employment was desperately scarce.
Indeed, the pump house outlived the purpose for which it was constructed—salt reaping—twice over. The first time came roundabout 1950, when the original salt company was forced to shut down. Anguillians, however, are nothing if not resilient and in the 1960s Rupert Carty and Joseph Owen paired to create the Anguilla Road Salt Company. At the time Carty had been working in Trinidad, where salt was needed in great quantities for the oil refining process. For the best part of the following two decades salt competed only with lobster as Anguilla’s mainstay, with the Anguilla Road Salt Pond Company producing more than 9,000 tons of it in 1967 and consistently exporting more than 400 tons to Trinidad on a monthly basis. The pump house, with its tall gabled roofs and exposed wooden beams, was the operating room of the whole enterprise.
A combination of unfavorable weather conditions and financial volatility in Trinidad brought dark clouds over the venture in the 1980s, and the passage of hurricane Klaus in 1984 put the final nail in the coffin of the Anguilla Road Salt Company. The pump house on one side of the road and a mound of leftover salt on the other remained as relics of what once had been an enviable business. The salt withered away, but the pump house refused to die, and ten years later Laurie Gumbs, a distant relative of Rupert Carty, together with his German wife, Gaby, gave the old building a new lease on life—one that, as it turned out, would last more than two decades.
Today, nothing is left of the much-loved pump house, once one of Anguilla’s most emblematic buildings. Hurricane Irma unleashed all its fury and shattered to pieces a structure that, though wooden, had withstood the passage of hurricanes Luis in 1995 and Donna in 1960, as well as many others before and after. The absence that exists in the space vacated by the pump house—by The Pumphouse—is as glaring as if a skyscraper had materialized out of nothing in the middle of the island. Gone are the four walls and Demarara windows that harbored so many stories of backbreaking toil and drunken revelry, of drag parties and traditional values. But there is more to the legacy of a building than a few anecdotes, and while the significance attached to it cannot be rescued from the rubble, every space—also an empty or replenished one—tells a story.
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I first came across the concept of landscape literacy in a brief essay by Anne Whiston Spirn included in the environmental project s.m.a.r.t. Paths to Sustainability.[1] Spirn argues that landscape, conceived as “the mutual shaping of people and place”, contains the “values, beliefs, ideas and identities” of the individuals and societies inscribed within it. Spirn speaks of landscape not in the traditional sense of pretty scenery but rather broadens its meaning to encompass everything that surrounds us in our lives—houses, roads, cables, beaches, bushland, and everything in between.
Taken in this sense, landscape becomes the legacy of a people, of all people, in any given place. But in order to understand such legacy, we have to learn to recognise the elements that form landscape’s set of symbols, and we have to evince the way in which they work. In other words, we have to learn the language of landscape in pretty much the exact same way we learn any foreign language, by developing a vocabulary and mastering the grammar.
Traditionally, we think of legacy or heritage in historical and highly compartmentalized terms. The legacy of a cricketer is hard to compare to the achievements of a politician, and a valuable painting constitutes and altogether different kind of heritage to a local recipe, though they both might be essential to the artistic and culinary identity of the same place. Landscape literacy allows us to read social, economic, political and environmental heritage simultaneously, formulating a comprehensive narrative that is articulated around the way space changes (or is changed).
The beauty of landscape literacy is that in its analysis of the interaction between the present and the past it brings down the traditional barriers of linear storytelling, affording us a valuable vantage point to predict the future, and therefore to shape it to our benefit. Even the most unremarkable of buildings bears witness to the social and natural causes that put in its place, rather than elsewhere, ultimately pointing to the future potential (or lack thereof) of that location and others around it. In Spirn’s words, “The language of landscape is a powerful tool. It permits people to perceive pasts they cannot otherwise experience, to anticipate the possible, to envision, choose, and shape the future landscape.”
In the Caribbean, perhaps more so than anywhere else, the patterns shaping the landscape are a work in perpetual progress. At the same time, the landscape itself—so essential to the Caribbean experience—bears its wounds openly, like the skin bears a scar or a tattoo, and tells a story in every barren patch, in every restored building, and also in every space vacated by a toppled structure. But what becomes of the departed buildings? What’s in a ruin? What, even, in empty space? Can any significance be attached to what no longer is there? Can a building that has touched the lives of many simply cease to exist?
These questions are especially pertinent in the context of the exceptional rebuilding task faced by some of the Leeward Islands in the aftermath of hurricane Irma, which partially or totally wrecked thousands of structures, although they remain relevant even under ordinary circumstances because change is constantly happening—and it never fails to leave a trace. When a tree is uprooted, when a building is demolished, whether by calamity or by design, something irretrievable is lost in the rubble but at the same time something else remains—something intangible, to be sure, but something that can be traced back nonetheless.
Naturally, no one could be expected to learn of hurricane Klaus and Joseph Owen, of Wager Rey and the Anguilla Salt Ponds Joint Stock Company merely by looking at the space where The Pumphouse no longer is. What can be divined from observation, what remains of the pump house in its absence, is subtler, a contribution to the layout of an urban area, a demarcation along the road, a name that survives, intact or corrupted, far longer than the structure that spawned it. In Anguilla, the Tamarind Tree in The Valley is a universally known landmark, even though the tree itself hasn’t been there for decades. For times immemorial the people of Anguilla congregated under its shade, which is why the crossroad by it became the busiest corner on the island, and the first one to get a modern traffic light. By then the tamarind tree was gone, though the name subsists to this day, as does its configuration of the island’s traffic.
The cataclysmic nature of hurricane Irma practically imposed upon the governments of several Caribbean islands the need to embark on an extensive program of redevelopment that will take many years to complete and that will reconfigure not just the geography of the islands but the shape of each of those nations. In Barbuda, for instance, the colossal task of making the island livable again is being coupled with an opportunistic drive to develop ultra-luxurious properties on a territory otherwise lacking in every aspect of infrastructure. While it’s easy to see the potential long-term benefits of private investment for Barbuda’s economic stability, the timing of these initiatives already raises concerns about their legitimacy. And that is even before addressing the elephant in the room that is Barbuda’s unique communal property system, which has been severely compromised by a series of legislative moves by the central Government of Antigua and Barbuda, in a clear effort to woo the corporate interests behind these development projects.
If for Barbuda the legacy of hurricane Irma has been an existential question, in Anguilla the situation has perhaps been less dramatic, but not for that reason any less significant. From the onset priority was given to upgrading key components of the island’s infrastructure, such as the new ferry terminal in Blowing Point, the larger commercial pier on Road Bay, and expanding the existing runway at the airport. Furthermore, the emergency funds granted by the British Government to Anguilla in the aftermath of hurricane Irma were earmarked for the construction of new and enhanced health and schooling facilities.
The confluence of a number of global and local factors, from hurricane Irma to the Covid-19 pandemic and the introduction of taxes in a territory known the world over for its beaches and its status as a tax haven, has conferred this juncture with an added sense of import. In Anguilla there is a palpable feeling that the future is now, and that things will never be the same—an island and a people transfigured by the elements. In the face of all this change, though, it is worth remembering every new beginning is built upon the foundations on whatever came before, which is why recognizing and understanding the different strata of the past—the layout and the structures and the spaces that have been—plays an essential in the forging of a better future.
[1] Anne Whiston Spirn. ‘Landscape Literacy and Design for Ecological Democracy’. s.m.a.r.t. Paths to Sustainability. Ed. ACCIONA. La Fabrica, 2017, pp. 94–9. https://pathstosustainability.com/2017/05/26 /landscape-literacy-and-design-for-ecological-democracy-anne-whitson-spirn/.
This piece borrows extensively from two articles published in Sint Maarten’s The Daily Herald in the aftermath of hurricane Irma: “Irma’s Legacy, A New Beginning for the Islands” and “Reading Change in the Landscape”.