‘Then all hell broke loose again’: A Boston chef describes surviving Hurricane Irma on devastated island
“People were huddled and swaying together with windows shattering and roofs coming off.”
Brian Poe
A Boston chef is heading home after surviving Hurricane Irma’s deadly rampage over the island of St. Martin.
“There was one point I thought I was gone — me and my wife were gone,” Brian Poe told The Washington Post.
Poe, the chef and co-owner of The Tip Tap Room and Bukowski Tavern, was celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife on the Caribbean island when the storm hit, killing about a dozen people.
The chef told the Post that when the category 5 storm hit the island on Wednesday night, he and about 100 guests took refuge in the flooded kitchen of the Sonesta resort as other parts of the building began to cave in.
“The winds were horrible — like nothing I’ve ever felt,” Poe told the Boston Herald. “People were huddled and swaying together with windows shattering and roofs coming off. The balcony doors at our hotel were just smashing.”
It was when the eye of the hurricane arrived that Poe said the resort’s general manager, Alex Katner, took life-saving action, shepherding the guests to higher ground as the storm momentarily calmed.
“He said, ‘We have to do this,’ ” Poe told the Post. “Don’t stop moving.’ “
The chef told the Herald they moved to three different locations before each ceiling collapsed or flooded.
“We all ran,” he told the newspaper. “It was bizarre because everything was destroyed — but it was silent,” he said. “Then all hell broke loose again. Roofs and glass and fire alarms and more wind and water everywhere.”
At one moment, he and his wife paused on the fifth floor of the resort, holding on to anything they could, as the two floors above them were ripped into the air, according to the Post.
Eventually they made it to a shelter run by the Dutch military, according to the Post. There, Poe gained access to sporadic cell phone service and survived, along with fellow stranded vacationers, on Ritz crackers and bottled water.
Several times, he was bused back and forth from the nearly-flattened airport, told a plane was coming to evacuate people, only to be informed later the plane couldn’t make it, according to the Post.
On Friday, help finally arrived in the form of the New York Air National Guard. Members of the 105th Airlift Wing and 106th Rescue Wing transported Poe and other American citizens to Puerto Rico. An estimated 5,000 Americans were believed to be trapped on the island and more than 1,200 had been rescued as of Saturday.
https://www.facebook.com/poe2go/posts/10155353908438153
https://www.facebook.com/poe2go/posts/10155351006008153
Poe told the Herald St. Martin will never be the same. Dutch officials have said that as much as 70 percent of the homes on the Dutch side of the island were badly damaged or destroyed.
“They lost everything to this storm,” he said.
