Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and the long road back for Grand Bahama Island (Untagged)

The Beach isn't just closed. It's broken.

As the 2018 North Atlantic Hurricane Season hits its September peak, I find myself thinking back to the wintertime vacation that Monique and I took with my folks to Grand Bahama Island in the Bahamas. The weather was warm, the island beautiful, but the most memorable thing I learned was how hard it is for a Caribbean Island to build back after a major hurricane.

Grand Bahama Island was struck by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. The hurricane made landfall in Freeport on the west side of the island as a Category Four hurricane, damaging 95% or more of the homes in some areas. Eighteen months later the devastation was still awful to see in some areas.

Good from afar...

... but far from good.

Beyond the physical impact, the economic impact lingers. One day, Monique and I took a walk along the beach in front of the Grand Lucayan resort in Port Lucaya, which has been closed since the hurricane struck. The resort has more than 1,000 rooms, 59% of all the rooms on the island. The owners, Hong Kong real estate company Hutchinson Whampoa, also known as Cheung Kong (CK) Property Holdings, decided to pocket the insurance money and sell off the property instead of rebuilding and reopening, leaving more than 1,000 former employees out of work and leaving many of the surrounding businesses with only a fraction of their previous trade. Only a couple of small pieces have thus far reopened.

When we visited this winter, this huge resort and casino was supposed to be sold off to a Canadian firm, the Wynn Group, and mostly reopened by August. That didn't happen. That didn't happen, perhaps as a result of Wynn Resorts owner Steve Wynn's problems after his history of sexual harassment was revealed. Instead, the government of the Bahamas itself purchased the resort in August 2018, hoping to eventually re-open it.

Lots of work still to do before it can open.

Despite all the damage ashore, the beach is still beautiful.

The Taino Beach Resort, where we stayed, also suffered a lot of damage. The storm surge rose to fill the unit we stayed in three or four feet deep. The resort reopened for business in just a few months, though the repairs still continue now, 18 months later.

In the meantime, this touristy island felt like a ghost town during what should have been its the high season. Hopefully for the sake of everybody who lives here they’ll be back in business this winter.

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(This post is part of a metadata tagging experiment on the ol' Patio Boat blog.)