Alfred Morain could hardly summon the words to describe what he experiences when he looks at his dead nutmeg trees, which Hurricane Ivan felled as it swept over this island three weeks ago, blowing away Morain’s livelihood with it.
“There is real devastation in my heart,” Morain said Tuesday, surrounded by his wife and four children outside the 10-by-12-foot wooden shack they call home.
Like thousands of other Grenadians, Morain is struggling to rebuild amid the wreckage left by Ivan, one of the most powerful storms to hit the Caribbean and United States in several decades.
Grenada, a relatively prosperous former British colony where tourism and the spice trade are the mainstays of the economy and where three-quarters of the nutmeg consumed in the United States is produced, sustained much damage during the hurricane.
At least 39 people were killed, and Prime Minister Keith Mitchell estimated the damage at $1 billion.
Now it is an island where houses have no roofs and the streets are lined with debris and downed power lines. Winds ripped the tops off most buildings, destroyed churches and schools, knocked down most of the island’s power lines and left corrugated steel roofing along the streets like used tissue paper.
Looting broke out on the island, twice the size of Washington, D.C., after the storm hit Sept. 7 and left several thousand of the nearly 90,000 residents homeless.
To complicate security matters, the warden of the island’s only prison let all the inmates out during the storm.
About 200 troops from neighboring countries arrived to help the local police quell the looting and track convicts who refused to return voluntarily to prison.
About a dozen convicts are still at large, said a police spokesman, Troy Garvey. A dusk-to-dawn curfew remains in place, and troops with automatic weapons guard banks in St. George’s picturesque downtown.
Government officials and aid workers said that clean drinking water and food are still scarce on much of the island, despite deliveries of aid coordinated by the National Emergency Relief Organization. Most residents lack electricity or telephone lines, they said.
All over the island this week, people could be seen putting up tarps to replace lost roofs and hammering together small frame houses that collapsed in the storm.
The high winds and tornadoes spawned by Ivan destroyed the roof and stained-glass windows of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, as well as the prime minister’s residence and the governor general’s mansion.
Several yachts ran aground in St. George’s harbor.
And the island’s two main crops, cocoa and nutmeg, have been wiped out; it will take at least a decade to regrow the nutmeg groves.
Most of the major tourist hotels were badly damaged as well. Several large airlines have suspended flights.
It has been a devastating psychological blow for the residents of this country, the site of a U.S.-led invasion in 1983 to topple a Marxist government.
Grenada had seen an average 7 percent growth in its economy for the past nine years and had not been through a major hurricane in more than four decades, Mitchell, the prime minister, said.
