Anytime it rains or the wind picks up, Heidi Badenock starts to worry.
“That’s just a consequence for going through something so life-changing,” said the 35-year-old attorney.
That life-changing event occurred on July 1, 2024. Badenock was in her family home on Union Island, a 3.5-square-mile (9.1-square-kilometer) Caribbean island that makes up one of the 32 islands and cays in the Grenadines in the southern Caribbean. Category 4 Hurricane Beryl barreled into the island midmorning with sustained winds of 150 mph (241 km/h), leaving the island, the structures on it, and its people devastated. Beryl would later become a Category 5 hurricane, the earliest to form in the Atlantic in recorded history, fueled by hot ocean temperatures made 100 times more likely because of climate change.
Badenock’s family sheltered under beds and in closet spaces as parts of the roof ripped away and windows imploded, allowing gallons of water to enter the house and nearly drowning Badenock’s father. Once the storm subsided and the family emerged from their hiding places, they were shocked by the surrounding reality.
All the homes around the house had their roofs ripped off. Debris was scattered everywhere, trees were flattened, and the once-verdant countryside was now brown, the result of whipped-up sea air that ripped through the vegetation.
Displaced people
A year later, the island has yet to recover completely.
The storm caused $230.6 million (USD) in direct economic damage to the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, representing 22% of the country’s gross domestic product in 2023, according to a World Bank report. The southern Grenadines, including Union Island, suffered disproportionately, with damage totaling $186.8 million (USD), which accounts for 81% of the national total of damage caused by the hurricane.
“I think maybe about – if I’m being extra generous – 75% of the houses have roofs again,” Badenock said, but a smaller number of those homes are actually habitable. “I mean, after such devastation and everything gets wiped out inside, it takes a while to get back to where you can live there to some degree of comfort.”
Although homes and other vital infrastructure like schools and clinics are on their way to being restored, the psychological and cultural effects of this storm will be long-lasting. Badenock said the people of the Grenadines, like most Caribbean people, have always prided themselves on being self-reliant and resilient, but “losing so much all at once, I think it crippled the spirit of the people.”
Right after the storm, Badenock’s family relocated to St. Vincent, the largest of the islands that make up the nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Over half the Union Island population was displaced to the mainland of St. Vincent in the months following the storm, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Many displaced people never return home, but Badenock doesn’t think this will be the case for her and her parents.
“I am sure Union is more than any place on this Earth home for me, so it will always be home,” she said.
Her father has been slowly rebuilding their family home, which now has a new roof but as of publication still needed windows and doors.
Badenock hasn’t been back to Union since November 2024, but her father and mother make weekly trips back and forth. She plans to go back soon.
“There still are people living in tents and [under] tarpaulins,” she said, “so it’s not all roses right now. And me personally, I think I’ve been trying to avoid my house.”
But she has decided that she has to go back and face her trauma and fear.
“I’m sure being there physically will make me feel a type of way,” she said. “I mean, if it rains too much, that makes me feel a type of way. So going to the site, I am sure, will evoke certain memories.”
Badenock said she is hopeful for the future, but she is also aware of the lasting psychological effects this storm will have on both herself, her neighbors, and her family.
“I know, especially for all the folks, when you worked all your life and this is all you have, this is all you know, and that gets ripped away from you, that is very, very traumatic,” she said. “They say children are resilient, and when you’re young, you can bounce back. But then when you’ve hit your 70s and 80s and your joy was sitting on your veranda and your porch and looking outside and now you can no longer do that and you have to think about, ‘OK, where am I going to live? Am I ever going to have a house again? Will I ever be able to live in this house again?’ That is depressing.”
Scarce aid
Unlike the U.S., which can immediately mobilize billions of dollars worth of resources in a disaster zone, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, which offers aid to members of an intergovernmental organization of Caribbean countries called CARICOM, has a budget of just over $1 million. A portion of that came from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has largely eliminated. This leaves a lot of the recovery effort in the hands of local governments and wealthy residents, which can lead to a politicized and unequal recovery process.
“I can sympathize with people from Dominica and Grenada and even New Orleans, Florida,” Badenock said, “but again, more so with the Caribbean countries because it’s hard. It’s much harder for us to get back to some semblance of normalcy than when these storms hit the U.S.”
St. Vincent and the Grenadines will have an election this year, and the recovery effort has divided people politically.
“[With] the current government holding the coin purse, people are trying to toe the line in hopes that, ‘If I’m proven to be worthy, I would get some help,’” Badenock said.
But in response to a reporter’s question on Facebook, others expressed frustration with the government’s oversight of the recovery.
The prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, has held office since 2001. He asked for help from wealthy expats living on the neighboring island of Canouan – a mecca for billionaires and millionaires escaping dreary weather and taxes.
One expat who has joined forces with the government is Ian Wace, one of the U.K.’s richest hedge fund managers. Wace is reported to be worth approximately £800 million (USD 996 million) and donated an approximate £5 million (USD 6.73 million) in materials and equipment that was used originally for one of his projects in Scotland, where he owns an island.
In a Facebook live during the unloading of this equipment on the neighboring island of Bequia, Prime Minister Gonsalves and Wace explained how the delivery came about.
“He is one of those who prioritizes keeping in touch with the community, and it was his natural instinct to help,” Gonsalves said of Wace.
“There are many many forces that I used to persuade him,” Gonsalves added.
Wace responded, “Charm, that’s all you used. Good looks, slight massage.”
Doctoral student Amandla Thomas-Johnson has not been back to the island since the weeks following Beryl, but he still has cousins and other family members on the island.
“No matter how much money you throw at it, it’s not going to bring back homes and livelihoods or the agriculture or the wildlife,” he said.
Thomas-Johnson recently saw brochures inviting tourists back to the Grenadines. The brochures assured prospective tourists that there were no visible signs of hurricane damage, but Thomas-Johnson says that the worst damage is not always visible.
“There’s a sort of thought that ‘All is well’ if people are back to a minimal means of survival, and they’re expected to basically live like that. There isn’t an expectation that people in Union Island will attain a much higher standard of living,” he said. “For me, that points to some of the structural inequalities in the region where these rich, wealthy jet setters can come in, they can open resorts. There’s a[n] underclass of people who can manage the doors, do the sort of basic hospitality work. But they will never really own the capital in these places, in their own lands, in their own islands. That’s a really big problem.”
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