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Hurricanes Past

Published 15th November 2001, 9:59am

Each year Cayman Islands residents face the prospect of severe weather causing damage to persons and properties. For most of recent memory such damage has been minimal compared to that suffered by other islands. Yet there are still lessons to be learned from storms that are now decades past, such as the late-season November 1944 hurricane which ravaged the Bodden Town coast and cut off West Bay from George Town. All information contained in this release is taken from a recent National Archive Memory Bank interview with Janilee Clifford. In it Mrs Clifford, who at the time was 12-years-old, tells interviewer Heather McLaughlin about the storm’s effects on her family, their home and their Bodden Town neighbourhood. At first she says, she and her younger sisters, were measuring how far up the tide washed sticks they had tossed in the surf. By the time the sticks reached her front door, they could tell that their parents were becoming increasingly worried. Janilee Clifford: Anyway, about 4.00 p.m., it got so bad that my mother started to cry and my father said, “Okay, lets go. Get ‘em ready. Heather McLaughlin: Now, your parents would clearly remember ’32? JC: Yes. That’s the year I was born. HM: Yes, so that would be in their minds, why she was getting frightened. JC: She was getting frightened because, in the 1932 hurricane, I got washed off the bed in my grandmother’s house. My mother and father were just-- they were trying to get out of the house with me-- they were trying to put a few things together-- and I’m in the middle of the bed, and they’re on either side, and the sea just came and washed over them and my mother just caught me on the side that she was on And then when it went back, out the door and… HM: So she’s got this all fresh in her mind, now, in 1944. JC: In 44, so she’s crying! HM: And the water’s coming right up to your front door. While modern-day Cayman relies on the National Weather Service for accurate, up-to-date information, Mr Jackson, like most people of the time, had only a barometer. When close monitoring indicated a dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure, he and his young family evacuated their home. JC: So he got-- there were six of us then-- Cassidy, the first son and my oldest brother, he was four-months old. And I remember they put him in a carton box with all of his little clothes around him and… we didn’t even have plastic, in those days to keep the rain off or anything. HM: No that’s right; yes. JC: They had a table cloth, the oil cloth-- took that off the table and put over his box, to take him with his clothes. HM: To try and keep him a little bit dry. JC: My father had him in the box, and then my mother was at the end, and the five of us girls in between. They told us to hold on to one another ‘cause it was blowing real hard then and we went to Mary Lawrence’s inlaws’ house, Addie and Bertie Woods house. There were about 12 families in that house, and I remember that night that the wind, it sounded like it was coming right through all the sides of the house and I can remember having hysteria. I was shaking and I couldn’t stop. It was terrible. JC: I tell you I was scared because-- the smaller ones were sleeping and we were all on one bed, my mother and the six of us, ‘cause they didn’t have but two-- three bedrooms in that house, and a lot of people were there, but I guess because she had a small baby they gave us one bed for ourselves. And we stayed there, we didn’t get back to our house. That hurricane was slow-moving and it was not like the 32. It wasn’t a tidal wave like the ’32, it was heavy winds, but very slow moving, so we stayed there ‘til Friday, before we got back to our house. HM: A whole week! A whole week! JC: Day after day after day-- I remember on about Wednesday or Thursday, the rains had stopped some then, and my second sister Floris, the two of us, they sent us to Mr Logan Bodden’s shop to get some food. I can remember that they told us to be careful because it was still blowing-- blowing hard enough to blow us off the road, where the Seventh Day Adventist Church is in Bodden town. I remember being blown like beyond that, and the sand. I can remember the sand stinging our legs. When a hurricane strikes the damage to persons and their possessions can be so horrific that people sometimes forget about another important aspect—the toll on the natural environment. In 1944 local flora and fauna were decimated. JC: That storm-- it had started to abate. They knew it was passing, I guess the eye had passed like before, maybe Tuesday or so-- it was a very slowmoving storm. But I remember when we went [to Mr Logan’s shop.] My father had told us that the kitchen had blown down, so we were curious and my mother said, “No, don’t go back to the house, go straight to Mr Logan’s.” But we were even frightened then. And when we did go to our house, I remember going to the beach and the beach was swept clean of all the lavenders and juniper trees and whatever trees were there-- even the lion’s tongue was swept away, ‘cause a lot of that was on the other side of our house in Bodden Town. And I remember seeing the first feather sticking up out of the sand-- the white sand. And we pulled--you know, just curious. That was a teal, a pond fowl, and as far as your eye could see, we were pulling them out of the sand by the hundreds. They were all dead and we didn’t try to eat them or anything, ‘cause the storm had lasted for so long. HM: Were there a lot of dead fish around? JC: Yes there were lots of dead fish. Well I can remember so many birds and fish buried up in the sand too. HM: So high had the water actually come? JC: The water came right to our porch, but it didn’t wash inside the house, because my grandfather, he wouldn’t move, he stayed there. Fortunately for the Jackson family, aside from the damage to their kitchen, their home remained intact for the most part. HM: Your house was alright, but the kitchen was destroyed? The kitchen would be down in the back? JC: The kitchen was not attached to the house. They had a -- what they call it, trampway, between the kitchen and the house, and that was gone. All the pots and pans were all up on the cliff, almost, behind our house. HM: Well, its incredible to me that the sea would cross the road and get all the way to your father’s house. That’s a long way from the sea there, really, isn’t it? JC: The sea was bad. It was not like the ’32 but it was bad. HM: Yes. You see this is something that I don’t think people appreciate today, because they talk about building the houses strong and everything, but they’re doing it to resist the wind, but really the biggest danger is the sea.