Heidi Badenock knew a storm was coming. But for the 34-year-old lawyer and Union Island resident, the first nine hours of July 1, 2024, were fairly normal, she later recalled. Residents of the 3.5-square-mile (9.1-square-kilometer) Caribbean island – part of the nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – had been attuned to the weather forecast for months because the island had been undergoing a severe drought.
“We’ve been following the weather, trying to figure out when rain is coming,” Badenock said on a recent WhatsApp call. As Hurricane Beryl approached, she and her family boarded up parts of their house. She felt pretty confident that they would ride out the storm safely.
By 9:30 a.m., Badenock noticed the wind was picking up. She eyed the garage roof. The electricity cut out. Then, shortly after 10 a.m., the garage roof was ripped off entirely by the howling winds.
That’s when she realized that this storm would be unlike any she’d ever experienced.
A monster storm
Beryl’s long life began as what meteorologists call a tropical wave, a low-pressure disturbance that drifted from the coast of west Africa on easterly winds. As the disturbance moved across the tropical Atlantic, it encountered feverishly hot ocean waters – temperatures typically not seen until September, at the peak of hurricane season. Climate change and the recurring climate pattern known as El Niño are the main factors driving the unusually warm waters.
To a hurricane, warm water is like the dry wood that fuels a bonfire. The disturbance developed into a tropical depression on June 28, rapidly intensified into a hurricane, then rapidly intensified again. By July 1, Hurricane Beryl was nearing Union Island as a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 mph. A monster.
Refuge under beds
Badenock’s father suggested that they take shelter under beds. From underneath the bed, Badenock texted a friend that she was scared. At 10:24 a.m., Badenock looked at Zoom Earth to see Hurricane Beryl’s location. The storm had yet to hit the island.
Her mother left the room. When she came back, she told Badenock that the roof over the bathroom was gone. Later, she heard the chandelier in the living room crash to the floor.
“In my mind, I was saying ‘This is it.’ I wasn’t sure at that point what the ‘it’ was, but now I know that was the beginning of the end to the home I knew all my life,” Badenock later wrote on her Facebook page.
Hurricane Beryl left a path of destruction that St. Vincent and the Grenadines have not experienced since Hurricane Janet in 1955. These islands generally lie outside the normal path of hurricanes.
Hours passed as Badenock lay under the bed, water pooling around her. She prayed. By now, phone service was gone.
Eventually, the howling of the wind began to quiet. The pressure in her ears lessened and the vibrating of the house eased.
“When I opened the door that first time I was in awe. The home I knew was no more,” she wrote. Outside, every home around her family’s house had their roofs ripped off. Debris was scattered everywhere, and the hills surrounding her home were brown, all the trees flattened.
She found her father, who had sheltered under a bed in another room. The windows had blown out, letting in water. He told her that he’d nearly drowned. For the rest of the storm, he’d sheltered under a mattress in the bathroom.
The aftermath
Though the storm was horrifying, in some ways, the days and weeks that followed were more difficult.
Within days, the air began to stink.
Stagnant water pooled in blocked drains and homes, inviting mosquitoes to swarm. Dead animals bloated and rotted in the extreme heat. Food went bad in fridges with no electricity. Bees swarmed in search of the trees and flowers that had been destroyed by the 150 mph winds and the salt whipped up from the ocean.
Doctoral student Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s family has lived on Union Island since his ancestors were brought to the islands as slaves to work on the island’s cotton plantations. He was living off the island when the hurricane struck but arrived 12 days later to help his family.
He took the ferry from St. Vincent, which stops at the islands of Canouan and Mayreau before Union Island.
“When we got to Union, the waterfront was completely smashed up,” he said. “I could hardly recognize it.”
His great-grand aunt lived in a hotel on the waterfront in the town of Clifton. He said that he couldn’t even recognize the building – a boat now sits where her bedroom was. As he made his way through the island, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“It was basically like a post-apocalyptic movie set,” he said.
But Unionites got to work, putting tarps on roofs. They cooked and slept in the few undamaged buildings. A professional kite surfer living on the island, Jeremie Tronet, had a Starlink kit that allowed people to call, text, and post that they were OK to worried loved ones anxiously awaiting news.
“I think this experience showed me the importance of community. I think maybe it’s something you take for granted on a normal day,” Badenock said. “But then when you literally are all in it together, then you realize how important it is just having people who would willingly open their doors or just do things for you just because.”
After damaging about 90% of the buildings on Union Island, Beryl intensified even more to a Category 5 hurricane as it made its way toward Jamaica. It was the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic.
‘Losing everything’
One month after Hurricane Beryl, the islands of the Grenadines are still reeling from the disaster.
An estimated one-third of Union Island’s roughly 3,000 residents have left the island, primarily for St. Vincent, the largest of the islands in this Eastern Caribbean nation.
The Minister of Agriculture, Saboto Cesar, said in a meeting of ministers of agriculture of the Americas that the country is on the brink of food insecurity after being hit by on average one climate disaster each year for the past five years. According to the St. Vincent Times, Hurricane Beryl destroyed 98% of banana and plantain production in the country and completely destroyed the fishing industry.
Badenock and her family are now staying with relatives on St. Vincent. They started a GoFundMe to try to raise enough money to rebuild their home, as have many other residents. Like most Union Islanders, they did not have insurance.
Badenock says her father broke down a few days after the storm.
“I think for him it probably hits harder because he built his home. That’s where he invested his resources,” she said. “At his age, it’s a lot to just think about losing everything, especially when you’re not sure what’s next in the recovery process.”
As of this writing, the government is still assessing the damage on all the islands. The neighboring islands of Mayreau, Carriacou, Canouan, and Petite Martinique were also badly affected.
The consequences of a warmer climate
Badenock is hyper-aware of what climate change is doing to her home.
“When you’re from a place that’s so tiny, awareness is a must … You can’t pretend that it’s not happening,” she said. “You know that 20 years ago it was never this hot. Twenty years ago … the water came up to a certain level. You know, you never used to see this much sargassum seaweed. You learn that the corals are bleaching out because of the hot water.”
She remains hopeful that the island will build back better, but that requires financial resources and better construction.
“It probably won’t take another 70 years for us to get another Category 4 or 5 storm,” she said. “So in another couple of years, we’re going to see the recurrence of Beryl … Homes are going to go, lives are going to be lost, and we’re going to be doing this all over again. And I think we should be improving on what we have based on our experience.”
Thomas-Johnson, the doctoral student who came back to the island to help his family, conducted a series of interviews with Union Island residents that he has published on his Facebook page. Among them was a secondary school teacher named Dana Joseph who had lost everything but some documents that were in a vacuum-sealed bag.
“But I’m happy that I have life and am here to talk about it. Anything that was lost can be rebuilt,” she said to him.
Now, more than a month after Hurricane Beryl, Union Island has cell service again but is still largely without electricity. School is still out for summer, but many residents are resistant to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves’s suggestion that all students be relocated to St. Vincent for schooling.
There are also growing frustrations that the other Grenadine islands are coming back online faster than Union Island.
Thomas-Johnson said that it is difficult to look at his homeland on the front lines of climate change, knowing what it has already gone through.
“With climate change, it’s like another blow because the countries that have contributed most towards greenhouse gas emissions have tended to be the richer countries,” he said. “Right now, poorer places that were already struggling to overcome colonialism are now being hit in the face. It’s like a double whammy.”
If you would like to donate to relief efforts in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, here are a few verified organizations working on the islands. There are also the GoFundMe campaigns set up by the Badendock family and other families on Union Island linked in the article:
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