The fever-pitched reconstruction work taking place in Negril a week after this tourist resort on Jamaica’s northwest coast was battered by Hurricane Ivan doesn’t seem to have affected the town’s casual, laid-back lifestyle.

Four men sit playing dominoes on the small verandah of a wooden shop at the entrance to the West End road. At other shops along the road, men and women huddle on the outside of the structures, engaging in what appears to be light conversation. A lone white tourist woman rides a rented bicycle slowly on the Norman Manley Boulevard, obviously enjoying the sunshine. She doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere in particular. She, though, is one of a handful of visitors left in the resort town.

Hotel workers who, since last Monday, have been clearing resort properties of uprooted trees, crumpled zinc sheets, shingles, sand, large stones and other debris, go about their arduous task with ease.

But there is no mistaking the determination to whip the product back in shape in time for the usually bumper Thanksgiving Weekend (November 25-28), regarded as the United States’ biggest holiday.

“We’re going to reopen on November 11,” Courtney Miller, general manager of Tensing Pen, stated confidently Friday.

“We already have bookings in the high 80s for that date,” he said, adding that reservations for Thanksgiving were already at 100 per cent.

Tensing Pen sits on Negril’s famed West End, the section of that tourist resort that received the hardest blow from category 4 storm Ivan two Saturdays ago.

Waves – some people say 50-feet high, others say higher – pounded properties built into the high, jagged cliffs on this strip of the island.

Structures were crushed, rooms flooded and fixtures broken like twigs by the hurricane’s destructive force.

“We were hit bad, but not totally devastated,” said Miller. “It’s salvageable in a good time.”

He showed the Sunday Observer the repair work being done on the rustic, thatched 16-cottage/20-room property which also has a bar and restaurant.

Rick’s Cafe was one of the properties that took a walloping. On Friday, no one was being allowed into the world famous bar, but evidence of Ivan’s onslaught – broken planks of wood, roofing material and other debris – lay in the front yard.

Although the gates to most of the properties on the West End were closed Friday, the damage done to each was visible from the road.

Donald Wallace, general manager at his family-run Mariner’s Inn, was optimistic. “We will not be totally fixed, but we expect to reopen in two weeks,” he said.

Wallace’s brother, Brian, said that the 52-room property had 80 per cent bookings for the end of September. He, too, was looking forward to the Thanksgiving Weekend business.

However, Twidlin Allen, owner/operator of Rock Cliff Hotel, was not quite sure if he would be able to cash in on that usually bumper event.

Fifteen of Allen’s 33 rooms were severely damaged. His cliff bar was wrecked and a substantial amount of furniture destroyed. On Friday, he had approximately eight young men working at cleaning up the hotel. “Next week I will hire some additional people to try and get things moving again,” he said, adding that tourists had already made reservations to stay at his hotel early next month.

“I’m going to work hard to honour those bookings,” he said.

Employment is obviously one upshot of the destruction. Throughout the resort on Friday, workmen were busy repairing hotels, restaurants and other businesses damaged by the storm.

The Sunday Observer was unable to get a specific figure of the jobs created and the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association area chairman, Carolyn Wright, could not speak to the newspaper during a visit to her hotel. She was “busy having lunch”, the newspaper was told.

At Sandals Negril, the hotel’s 380 staffers, joined by 70 skilled artisans, were taking a short lunch break when the newspaper visited.

“We have been here since Monday getting the hotel back in order,” public relations manager, Burchell Henry said.

Although the hotel did not suffer any major structural damage, it experienced substantial dislocation of its landscape and, like two of its sister properties in Negril – Beaches Negril and Beaches Sandy Bay – has been closed.

The Sandals Group has not yet said when it intends to reopen the hotels. That information, the Sunday Observer was told, should be forthcoming this week.

At the 72-room Negril Tree House, general manager, Casita Stoner was upbeat. “We will be open full swing in mid-October,” she said.

Further south in Treasure Beach, Jakes owner/operator Jason Henzell said he intended to reopen in the next 10 weeks.

“We didn’t have any structural damage,” Henzell acknowleged. “What we suffered was mostly landscape damage.”

Henzell said the hotel’s popular Jack Sprat restaurant should be open by this week and he thanked the Treasure Beach community for the encouragement and support they had been giving to the hotel.

“The community has really rallied around us by just coming by and giving us encouragement,” said Henzell. He also said that the morale among his staff was very high. “They feel we have to get it back up and running.”

The speedy reconstruction is good news for Denton Anderson, who operates Tykes Motorbike and Bicycle Rental on Negril’s West End road. “Since Monday I have not done any business,” he told the newspaper.

Normally, he said, he would rent four to five bikes daily at a minimum of US$35 each.