Winds topping 100 mph battered the storm-windows on the St. Martin hotel room where Jeri Rodin and David Tanner hunkered down on their bed, watching as Hurricane Irma sliced across the island early this month.
The couple knew the tempest was headed toward the Caribbean island when they arrived Aug. 28, but they assumed it would turn north and pass by, like so many storms had in the past.
Instead, Irma made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane. When the walls began to creak and the sliding doors swayed, leaving 2-inch gaps near the top of the frames, the couple realized what they were in for.
From their Rancho Palos Verdes home last week, the couple recalled weathering the storm, from days huddled in a darkened lobby to a last-minute flight to Canada and safety at last. The trip is one they take annually, meeting up with other couples each year in a favorite setting that’s usually much closer to paradise.
Through it all, Rodin recalled the chaos amid the storm, their uncertainty as the fierce winds raged around them and, perhaps most memorable of all, the people they met — and their willingness to help total strangers.
“It’s just the people, how we all came together,” Rodin said.
‘Everything else is in limbo’
The full force of Irma struck the island on the afternoon of Sept. 5. Swirling wind sucked the curtains through gaps between the windows and walls and out of the couple’s room until Tanner jumped up to tie them off.
He also wedged open the door to the hallway to relieve the pressure building up as the storm sucked air from the room.
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Rodin, worried for Tanner’s safety, called for him to move away from the undulating glass.
“When you’re focused on a project, everything else is in limbo,” Tanner said. “And that’s what happened in the room — I was focused on making sure that these windows didn’t blow out.”
The pair nervously waited out the first stages of the storm on their bed. During a brief respite, while the eye of the storm passed over their island, they joined a dozen other families huddled together in the hotel lobby.
The record-shattering storm, which would ultimately kill more than 70 people in the United States and the Caribbean, whipped around the building, demolishing the hotel’s laundry room and a small restaurant near the main building.
About 8 a.m., the weather subsided, and Tanner and Rodin ventured back into the interior of the resort.
‘Nuclear zone’
Tanner and a fellow traveler started sweeping upper floors, looking for injured people and any supplies they could bring back to the crowd in the lobby.
They picked their way through debris-strewn furniture and clambered over refrigerators blown into the hallways through doors ripped from their hinges.
“The fourth and fifth floors just looked like a nuclear zone,” Tanner said. “It was amazing.”
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Rodin and a friend scrambled back to their adjoining rooms to find two inches of water covering the floor. Lights dangled precariously from the ceiling, which had partially given way. The two women gathered what dry bedding they could find in nearby rooms, and lugged it back to the lobby.
The instinct to help anyone who might need it, Tanner said, proved to be instinctive.
“A lot of people … weren’t capable of doing stuff, but that was fine” he said. “If you’re healthy and somebody else is in need, (you) go take care of them, and it didn’t matter where you’re from or who you were or anything else.”
The travelers hunkered down in the lobby with a generator they ran each morning from 6-10 a.m. to conserve the little fuel they had.
Waiting to leave
After a few days in the devastated hotel and fuel running low, the couple and several other travelers packed up their belongings and made their way to the airport, where crews on military planes scrambled to transport travelers off the island.
Outside the hotel, navigating through palm trees scattered along the beach, they found a Coast Guard cutter boat that had washed ashore directly atop where a seaside bar once stood.
Nearby, a charter boat lay upside down a few feet from the harbor.
On the street, cars were flipped over. Chunks of buildings covered the roads.
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When they arrived at the airport, which had just one working runway, Rodin and Tanner joined the growing line of passengers waiting to board a military plane.
“Most of the airport was destroyed,” Rodin said, “but flights were getting in to pick people up.”
Passengers on the military jet had to leave behind their luggage — other than a backpack or purse. She and Tanner were ready to comply when she heard a quiet voice asking if any American passengers were willing to fly to Canada.
Rodin and Tanner looked at each other and jumped at the chance.
“We were in the right place at the right time,” he said.
They tugged their bags along to a Westjet Airlines counter, showed their passport and walked onto the tarmac and up to their plane. A half-hour later, they were off the ground and on their way to Toronto.
They spent a night there before Westjet flew them back to Los Angeles.
“When he showed me those tickets (to LAX),” Rodin said, “I just started crying,”
No fear about a return
Throughout the experience, Rodin said she and Tanner met people willing to help them at every turn — from the hotel manager who stayed on during the storm to the Canadian customs agent who stayed with them into the early hours of the morning when they arrived in Toronto.
Despite the harrowing trip, Tanner said he has every intention of returning to St. Martin.
“Let’s face it, we have earthquakes here and I’m not running away because we’re going to have an earthquake at some point. It’s just part of nature,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot of different stuff — it’s just where you are and what happens to come by where you’re located.”
Fear of another storm won’t prevent him from traveling to a locale he loves, he said.
“You can’t be a fear-monger,” he said. “There’s no life there.”
