Half Moon Caye loses and gains from Mitch
In the days following Hurricane Mitch I reported from San Pedro on the damage that community suffered and the drama its residents endured. Tonight I’m back from a trip to an island far more isolated than Ambergris and one which came a whole lot closer to the threat of total devastation.
On Monday morning, October twenty-sixth, Hurricane Mitch was a hundred and forty miles East Southeast of Half Moon Caye. Although it was well out of Mitch’s path, the island sustained damages that were far greater than any storm in recent memory. Seventy-five year old Carl Cabral is the island’s lighthouse keeper.
Carl Cabral, Lighthouse Keeper
“It will never recover to what it was. Never. Because it was badly beaten with Hattie and this one, it was so far off, but it did more damage than what Hattie did.”
Cabral, who once could have walked quite comfortably underneath his house, to fill a bucket of water, or take an afternoon nap in his hammock, is no longer able to, because of the sand that has accumulated as a result of the high waves.
Carl Cabral
“One step went down, both steps went down and one of the post from the house went down. We, if it had last one hour or two more, I believe this whole part of the house would have been gone because the outer part was already going. Thank God we are still here.”
Cabral, along with his assistant and neighbor, Rudolph Neal and the island’s warden, Uriah Rhaburn, quickly left the island as water started coming on land that Monday morning.
Uriah Rhaburn, Warden, Half Moon Caye
“The plumbing has been broken. All the water came out of the well; the well has been covered by three feet of sand and coral. Most of the antennas are down, mine is down, leaning a bit but still working. My solar panel is no where to be found. It’s probably under those palms there. The battery is right over there; it was under the house buried under sand about two feet.”
Rudolph Neal, Assistant Lighthouse Keeper
“This was filled with water. This was up on that stand there, filled with water and when I found it, it was down there filled with sand.”
Q: “So how are you getting water?”
Rudolph Neal
“Well right now I am getting water from Mr. Cal because this water in my tank is salt, so you could just imagine what the waves were doing.”
Nick Bougas, the Deputy Expedition Leader for Trek Force, a U.K. based charity organization which is in charge of a cleanup campaign on the island, was one of the first persons, along with the Belize Audubon Society, to tour the island shortly after it was hard hit.
Nick Bougas, Dep. Expedition Leader, Trek Force
“The level of sand; the amount of sand; the level of trees that have been knocked down; the huge concrete boulders that were supporting the weather station, just moved. They weigh at least a ton, knocked over! Incredible! The destruction!”
Jacqueline Woods
“It’s not only a mountain of sand that has built up on the caye, but the island as well is covered with fallen coconut trees including rocks, shells and dead coral that were brought in by the huge waves that came shore.”
Swells, as high as twenty-five feet, crashed on shore, pushing back the beach and demolishing everything in their path. One structure that was moved several feet from its foundation and buried under four feet of sand is the Weather Bureau’s fifty thousand dollar remote station.
Albert Jones, Senior Electronic Technician
“As you can see here, this station was actually at this point, this was the actual grounding rod that was hammered into the rock. That was right next to the base. This was only protruding about three or four inches above ground, so as you noticed, the whole beach was washed out almost four feet.
So that is telling you, that the whole island itself, that four feet of erosion and that was what undermined the base of the antenna and with just a foot of the base being out of ground after they washed away, the surrounding four foot soil, the whole mast itself got unstable and I guess even a fly would have been able to push it down at that time.”
Because most of the station’s electronics have been exposed to sand and saltwater, Albert Jones, Senior Electronic Technician for the Belize Weather Bureau, believes it may be impossible to save the equipment, but is hoping that they will be able to retrieve the data that was logged on the system.
Albert Jones
“This is the unit itself that actually does the transmitting by satellite and this is the unit that collects the weather information from all different centers that were attached to the weather station itself.”
Bougas says they have removed a line of debris over a hundred feet long and four to five foot high.
Nick Bougas, Dep. Expedition Leader, Trek Force
“Our current expedition is trying to improve the area for people to come in more easily. Everything was under two, three feet of sand. The benches were buried; there were no access to the platform, the viewing platform for the Booby Bird Sanctuary. That was completely blocked by debris and materials, so we cleared that out.”
Bougas says because the Belize Audubon Society, which manages Half Moon Caye, does not want any burning on the island, the debris collected will be loaded onto a barge and then deposited in a proper manner on the mainland. It was not only litter that Bougas and his team collected. The island, which is well known for its birds, like the Red Footed Booby and Frigates did lose a number of its feathered residents.
Nick Bougas
“We found six dead Red Footed Booby birds, there are probably a lot more and we found about three or four Frigate birds and several others, you know, Grackles and a few other smaller birds.”
Miraculously, the bird sanctuary only received some minor water damage and we were relieved to see a healthy number of the Red Footed Boobies already nesting in the tree tops. A survey will need to be done to see if the bird population was severely affected, but according to Pamela Scott, B.A.S. Protected Areas Manager there were some good coming out of the otherwise bad situation.
Pamela Scott, Protected Areas Manager, B.A.S.
“What we could see here is that we have gained some beaches around the area, like on this end we could say about six hundred square yards of beach. On the other end we gained roughly one fifth of a mile of beach. What we can safely say is that we had three to four feet of sand most of the island accumulated. The other positive effect, the rat population seem to have decreased a bit.”
Also, just several yards out from the caye, a little island has been formed out of the sand and coral that were washed in from the sea. Another interesting site, as you approached the island is the famous shipwreck, which had remained relatively intact atop the reef. Today, the ship, although it managed to remain at the site, was broken up into several sections, fortunately Half Moon Caye did not suffer a similar fate.
While all the permanent residents of Half Moon Caye managed to evacuate, two people who subsequently came over from Sandbore Caye rode out the storm on Half Moon.
