Fifteen years after those words were written, I am standing on the
shoreline at Runaway Bay. It is mid-January, the height of the tourist
season in the Caribbean tropical islands. The sea, as its groundswell
rushes in, retains those same wondrous shades—the navy blue, the
turquoise, the cobalt. Something is missing: There is no sand. No
sand, no tourists. The effect is not so much unreal, as surreal.
Lionel Hurst, since 1988 serving first as ambassador to the United
Nations and then as ambassador to the United States for Antigua and
the neighboring island of Barbuda, points to the waves crashing
against a metal wall just below the concrete patio of the Sunset Cove
Hotel. “The owner put in that barrier to try to save his property after
Hurricane Luis came ashore in September 1995,” Hurst says. “The
waves used to break 23 feet further out to sea. But that entire stretch of
beach just disappeared, overnight, and it’s never returned. So nobody
wants to stay here now. The hotel’s clients used to walk up a little fur-
ther and swim. But you can see the same thing has happened in that
half-moon area there. Basically, about 1,000 feet of sand has eroded
along what used to be one of our most idyllic areas.”
Hurricane Luis was the most devastating storm the island had ever
seen. With gusts approaching 200 miles an hour and sustained winds of
more than 140, Luis damaged 90 percent of Antigua’s homes, 65 percent
of its business sector, and left seven thousand people unemployed. In a
small country now dependent on tourism for 70 percent of its income,
virtually all such facilities along the coast needed extensive repairs.
This was the first hurricane to directly strike Antigua since 1950.
Yet it was followed, within a week, by Tropical Storm Marilyn. In 1998
came Hurricane Georges. In 1999 came Hurricane José and then
Hurricane Lenny. Forecasters called that one “wrong-way Lenny,” since
it emerged from the west, spinning in the opposite direction of a typi-
cal storm, and hammered the westerly side of the island, which usually
escapes the brunt.
Clearly, something new was in the wind. “A signal,” as
Ambassador Hurst puts it, “that something is terribly wrong.” Simply
stated, warmer ocean temperatures put greater moisture into the
atmosphere, two variables that work to power hurricanes. Caribbean-
wide, as Hurst would summarize in March 2003 at the World Water
62 Dick Russell