The past four days have been some of the craziest for me in a long time. Basically a category 1 hurricane hit Barbados, no one was prepared for it, and I lost power for close to 63 hours and water for about 6 hours. Here's the story in detail:
It started as a typical Friday afternoon. I woke up late and immediately headed out to the supermarket to do my weekly grocery shopping. I bought my stuff and while in line even convinced the store shuttle to wait for me before leaving. On the ride home (this is around 5pm) the driver was listening to the radio which interrupted a song to announce that tropical storm Tomas was headed toward Barbados and would begin hitting the island in the next hour or so. Of course this was the first I had heard of the storm but I figured that since 1) I had just purchased food I should be OK to stay indoors for a day or so and 2) that since it was just a tropical storm it wouldn't cause that many problems, so there was nothing to worry about. It turns out few people (including the meteorological service, police, etc) knew the storm was coming more than a couple hours before it hit. Talk about poor planning!
At first the storm didn't seem that bad. It was mostly just raid and some light to moderate wind. Furthermore, I was able to leave my windows open without water coming in, which is the best test of a storm's strength that I have devised here. Over time though the storm worsened. Starting around 9pm I began loosing internet service every 30 minutes or so. Then around midnight the power went out for the first time. I ran around lighting candles but the period of darkness was cut short after 15 minutes when the power returned. It stayed on until a bit after 3am when it went off again for what turned out to be the next 63 hours. By this time the wind was really howling and the rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear the sheetmetal fencing and roofing of my neighbors' homes getting pulled willy-nilly in the wind. I was worried that the wind would rip them loose and fling them around, potentially crashing into my building, but thankfully that did not happen. Oddly enough, water was still not pouring in through the windows, so I left them open. This quickly changed however.
Once again I started running around lighting candles. I had squirreled away a small stockpile of 32 tealight candles which were really cheap but because of their small size only last around 4 hours. This was OK for this first night since the power went out at such a late time but would eventually prove to be a problem on Saturday and Sunday. After sorting some things out I decided I should just go to bed. By this time it was 7am, so I shut the door to my bedroom and tried to ignore the raging fury outside. Since no water had been pouring in through the windows, I stupidly LEFT THEM OPEN. Thus, when I closed the door to my bedroom, the wind started shaking it around really loudly. Eventually I decided I couldn't sleep with that noise so I got up to open the door. The sight that greeted me was unpleasant, to say the least. In that short span I had tried to fall asleep, the wind had brought water into my apartment in mass quantities, spreading it all over my dining room table (including on my laptops, books, papers, etc) and all over the floor. By this point the only dry towel I had left was a small hand towel, which was woefully inadequate for the job of cleaning up this mess. I quickly shut the windows and cleaned off the laptops for fear they would short circuit. I then dried off the books and moved them into my bedroom. After this I tried reusing towels that I had used to clean up flooding in my bedroom but they mostly just displaced the water rather than absorbed it. Lacking any alternatives to this I decided to leave the problem until tomorrow and head back to sleep. So finally around 8am I passed out in my bed.
I woke up at 4pm and after realizing I still had no power decided to make the most of the remaining daylight. I started by trying to clean the apartment for Nora's arrival the following day. This was a disaster since with no way to do laundry I couldn't put fresh sheets on the bed or get fresh towels. I also couldn't clean the kitchen since things were getting displaced due to the fact that the fridge was off. I was also limited by the fact that the natural light was extremely limited to begin with since the storm was still raging and the sky was overcast. Thus I couldn't see well enough to really clean the bathroom/shower. Basically the apartment was a mess.
I decided to give up and embrace the chaos and coming darkness. I lit the remaining candles I had, lay down on the couch, and alternated between reading by my giant maglight and playing my nintendo DS. For dinner I had barbecue potato chips and a variety of wonderful cereal bars. In between my reading/video game sessions I ran around the apartment scrapping the last bits of wax from burnt out candles and depositing them into still-burning ones. I was dangerously close to being out of candles and I needed to maximize the amount of fuel (in this case wax) that I could access. I passed roughly 4 hours doing this then called it a night. Since it was too dark to take a shower and I felt super gross I decided to just sleep on the couch rather than bring my filthy body into my relatively clean bed. With the storm still raging outside I eventually passed out on the living room couch.
I woke up at 8am to the wonderful sound of a receding storm. Tomas, which had been upgraded to a category 1 hurricane, was finally leaving Barbados! However, I also woke up to the realization that at some point during the night I lost water. At that moment I found myself without power and water, in a disaster of an apartment, with my girlfriend due to arrive in roughly 7 hours. To say I was a bit panicked and frustrated is an understatement. I quickly ate breakfast (more cereal bars and potato chips) and then decided I needed access to the internet to get local news, contact my parents, and figure out what to do with Nora. I left the apartment and walked over to the graduate school campus. During the walk over I came across a bunch of fallen power lines, uprooted trees, and lots of debris scattered everywhere. The graduate school campus was in good condition but it was locked when I got there (it is supposed to be open 24/7). With my anger/frustration reaching a boiling point I immediately started yelling "SON OF A BITCH" over and over. The security guard must have heard me because he came over, asked me if I was a grad student, and let me in. I thanked him profusely and immediately headed down to the computer station to begin sorting things out.
Browsing the news told me that many Barbadians had not only lost power and water because of the storm but had also lost their roofs (sheet metal roofing is extremely common here) and many of their possessions. This quickly put my situation in perspective as I realized how lucky I was to have an intact home. Still, with Nora arriving and me not having an power/water, my parents suggested that I think about a hotel for the week. This sounded like a great idea, but the problem was that most of the hotels in the area either didn't have power or were all booked up because of the scheduling nightmare that the storm had caused on their arrival/departures. With no hope of securing a hotel I decided around 11:45am to go catch a bus to the airport so as to pick up Nora. I got to the bus stop around 11:50 and proceeded to wait for 30 minutes during which time not a single bus (no government buses, no rasta buses, no white buses) came. Normally you don't have to wait more than 5 minutes before some kind of bus comes. Obviously the bus service wasn't working (a fact later confirmed via radio and newspaper) so I decided to walk to the local supermarket to collect some supplies for another night of now power and now, no water. I felt bad about not being able to pick up Nora at the airport, as the Barbadian terminal isn't the most organized experience (just like the entire country), but I had told her the night before via text message that I might not be able to make it, so she knew to hop in a cab if she didn't find me waiting for her. On the walk to the supermarket I came across even more destruction. I saw a utility pole ripped in half, lots of uprooted trees (many lying on top of utility lines), and many fallen power lines. The general chaos led me to believe that it was going to take a long time for the power company to get power back to my neighborhood. I was determined to prepare for a week without power.
At the supermarket I loaded up on candles, matches, and non-perishable foods like pasta and more potato chips. Since my stove is gas and not electric my plan was to light it with a match and cook the perishable items in the freezer that night so as to use them before they went bad (this was my Dad's suggestion). I tried doing this immediately after Nora arrived at my place (well actually I had to flag down the lost cab driver on the main road then lead him to my place, but same difference) so as to take advantage of the remaining natural light and it started out well. However the gas quickly sputtered out. I figured the gas tank must be out so I went outside to switch over the line to the second tank (the idea being that when one tank runs out you start using the second tank and have the first tank replaced, then rinse and repeat). This tank was out of gas as well, and I got REALLY PISSED. Clearly the person who was living here before me had failed to replace the first tank when it ran out, so now I was stuck without any gas. (Thankfully water service had been resorted earlier that afternoon, so I was just without power and gas, rather than power, water, and gas). The person who lived in this apartment before me generally sucked - she was apparently overweight which caused her to rip off the toilet seat from the toilet many times. So many times in fact that the landlady stopped replacing them so I am stuck using a loosely attached seat. Ugh, there are so many examples of crap like this being left over from this previous person. I want to find her and destroy whatever place she is living in now as revenge.
Anyway, without any gas to cook with I had to throw out all the food that was in my freezer, as it wasn't going to last another day without power. There's nothing like throwing out $50 worth of food to cap off an otherwise wonderful day. Instead of cooking a nice meal, I had to settle for, and Nora got to experience, a dinner of cereal bars and potato chips! Welcome to paradise Nora! Luckily my netbook still had close to full power so we were able to watch a couple of episodes of the Simpsons off my portable hard drive to pass the time. We were both exhausted so we called it an early night and were in bed by 9pm.
One of the drawbacks of storms in the tropics is that they tend to make the weather more hot and muggy. This was the case with Tomas, so trying to sleep in my non air-conditioned bedroom was fitful. Eventually we gave up trying to go back to sleep around 9am, had a breakfast of potato chips and muffins, and headed off to the grocery store to buy even more candles and see if the local hotels had received power yet. The hotels still didn't have power, so we started planning for another night in my dark apartment. To compensate, we stopped at a local restaurant (Just Grillin') for a fresh, warm meal. I had the grilled flying fish while Nora had the barbecue chicken sandwich. Both were very good and hit the spot that potato chips, cereal bars, and packaged muffins hadn't been able to fill over the past couple days. After this we dropped the candles and other groceries off at my apartment and walked over to the grad center to take advantage of its working internet to try finding an available hotel and to let the landlady know that the apartment was out of gas. After 3+ hours of looking and placing phone calls I finally found a place that wasn't outrageously expensive, had power/water/internet, and was nearby. Since the hotel couldn't take us until tomorrow I decided it made sense to grab dinner, bring it back to the apartment, and see if anything had changed since we had last been there at 1pm.
We went to a local joint and picked up some food to bring back to the apartment (an absolute ton of food for a grand total of $16). On our walk back to my place the landlady's husband drove past us in his car and stopped to tell us that not only did he just put in new gas tanks but that electrical power was going to be back on for the entire neighborhood within in an hour. The Barbados Light & Power guy sitting in the front passenger seat confirmed this (no idea why he was in the car but was too happy to care) and pointed to the work truck down the road that was fixing some fallen power lines.
Nora and I then proceeded to eat our dinners while watching some episodes of the Simpsons on my netbook, which had a full battery from being charged at the grad school earlier today. An hour later the power came on and the entire neighborhood started cheering. It was like when the Yankees win the world series and you can hear all the drunks going nuts in Manhattan.
We're both really happy that power is back and that we don't have to stay at the hotel. We've spent the rest of the night cleaning up, doing laundry, and making plans for tomorrow. Our plan is to go to St. Nicholas Abbey (http://www.stnicholasabbey.com/) in the morning for a nice tour and some delicious rum and then stop at the Supercentre on the way back to pick up new frozen foods/vegetables to use for dinner. I'll try to remember to bring my camera for photos of the abbey. It is supposed to be a beautiful building situated on really nice grounds.
So thats the story of my last 96 hours. It's been pretty crazy but thankfully everything is back to normal. It definitely put some things into perspective for me regarding dependency, privilege, and planing. Sorry for the long-winded story but I wanted to write it all down while it was still relatively fresh in my head!
I hope my next couple of posts are more positive!
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