Waiting for Hurricane Beryl

2 July 2024, 6pm, Kingston, Jamaica

Screenshot, Weather Underground

The day before a storm has certain features. It is hot, airless and so still that a storm seems impossible. The roads are corked due to traffic – people trying to get home, stock food and water, buy groceries. The talk is always how the storm will swerve at the last minute and save us. Jamaica is lucky, man. Special. Everybody knows that. Folks on social media will inveigh against negativity and object to bad things being wished into being. Prayers will be said. We’ll reach out to family and friends – you batten down? You off the road? You got your meds? And everywhere people will tek serious ting an mek joke.

On my way home this afternoon, I got stuck on a certain road. Just stuck, no movement forward, no cars coming the other way. Has to be an accident, I thought. There were some men at the side of the road, and I asked them what had happened up ahead. Nuttn Miss, they said. Jus traffic. Evry whey block up.

The radio stations send out bulletins – various companies are closed, drain cleaning is nearing completion, the utility and communications companies are ready for the hurricane. The online weather sites show slightly conflicting models as to track and intensity – but on this occasion the models are in fair agreement. Hurricane Beryl is a major hurricane, at this writing forecast to be Cat 4 when it hits or passes close to Jamaica and right now, it looks like a direct hit. The words ‘devastating’ and ‘catastrophic’ are used in every broadcast, along with ‘life-threatening’.

Our little cottage is in the shade of a venerable avocado pear tree, which we did not prune this year because it has a few pears on it. When the storm threatened only a few days ago, we stared up at it, wondering. In the end, we decided it was okay, and anyway, given the short time between when the storm was just a storm and its transformation to a Cat 5 hurricane, there was no time. All tree cutters, carpenters, roofers, electricians and plumbers were fully occupied. Maybe tomorrow the pear tree will fall. Maybe on one or both of us. If it holds up, the pears will be gone.

Many emotions swirl, but at this point, fear is not one, even though I know my life could change completely tomorrow. Our house could be severely damaged, even destroyed, we could lose almost every possession. We could be injured, killed, transformed into a statistic. I tell myself: that could happen any day. I’m tired and achy from all the preparations, but also feel a small satisfaction at getting through the tasks. We’ve done what we can. I’m glad Beryl is moving quickly and will hit during the day – a hurricane at night is truly terrifying.

I feel sadness at the threat that now faces so many Jamaicans living in vulnerable situations – flood prone areas, riverbanks, the coast, beside gullies, on steep hills, in remote places which will inevitably be cut off by the hurricane. The island’s landscape will be remade, I know this from hurricanes past, trees will fall, hillsides will come down, the coastline will be redrawn. And there will be damage, maybe even disastrous damage, to the island’s infrastructure and to many, many homes.

But mostly I feel anger tonight. Anger at the governments of the world which have met and talked and failed to act on the threat of the climate crisis, which scientists have warned about for decades, the warming spawning more intense hurricanes. For months we’ve heard about the high sea temperature of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. I’m angry at the oil companies, those multi billion dollar corporations led by ordinary men and women who have lied and obfuscated and told us to calculate our carbon footprint because it was our use of their products that was the problem. Yeah, fossil fuels built our civilization, I concede that, I use their products, am using one now (before I get infuriating comments to that effect), but they also have compromised the very atmosphere of our planet, the earth’s climate and the same civilization they gestated.  

One time the CEO of a small oil company came to my office when I still worked at the Jamaica Environment Trust. He was from one of the companies seeking prospecting licenses to look for oil in our waters. After I’d asked him the usual questions about whether he had children and what did he think about their future and how could he participate in this awful industry, he said, Well, if we don’t someone else will.

So here we are. I could end this piece with a list of the various extreme weather events occurring all over the world as I write, but I won’t. It seems we – humanity – cannot imagine another way of living on the earth, a better, fairer, more respectful way, and due to that failure of the imagination, we will watch it all burn, flood, melt or vanish in the whirlwind.