FISHERFOLK along Hellshire Beach in Portmore, St Catherine, are once again counting their losses after Hurricane Dean wrecked several stalls, boats and homes along the coastline on Sunday.

The hurricane, which traversed Jamaica’s southern shoreline, is the second weather system in three years to cause significant damage to the beachfront community.

“[Hurricane] Ivan come mash we up wah day and now dis ya one,” shouted one fisherman, who was busy trying to find pieces of his demolished hut. Further along the beach, several flattened stalls – some made of concrete – were seen strewn along the sand.

“Nobody no dead pon de beach, but is jus’ dat everything mash up,” said fisherman Ferdinand Smith, pacing the sand even as he continued to search the rubble that lay before him.

“All now me no even see me boat… me haffi get one drive to go out a Old Harbour or Rocky Point fe see if me see it,” he added.

But Smith’s boat wasn’t the only vessel that Hurricane Dean’s strong winds relocated, since another – about 20 feet long – was seen lodged atop a tree.

Fisherman Desmond Abrahams also reported that his boat went missing, along with some furniture that he stored in his zinc shed.

“Everything gone, a jus come fe nail up back an’ get my things together,” he told the Observer yesterday.

Another fisherman, John Behari, bemoaned that 30-foot swells of seawater broke the bright yellow concrete walls of his restaurant and had him waist-deep in water.

“Me did haffi run lef’ me shop in the middle a [the Hurricane] cause it look like me did about fe drown,” he said. The sandy soil that formed the floor of Behari’s restaurant, had a huge crack, and bits of broken wall lay like puzzle pieces – signs of how high the water rose in the building.

“We a ask if anybody can give we a loan, we will work and pay it back ’cause this is we livin’,” Behari said. “We no know how we a go manage”.

But while Behari’s mind is preoccupied with “getting back on his feet”, his colleague Aston Salmon was more fortunate. Salmon had moved his equipment and other belongings to safety the day before, and realised how prudent a decision he made when the “sea came an’ knock over everything”, on Sunday.

A few metres from the beach, the signs of disaster were also evident. Seventeen newly erected concrete utility poles went down, blocking much of the Hellshire main road. The road block resulted in a traffic pile-up for almost a mile along the thoroughfare, forcing several passengers to exit their vehicles, opting instead to walk over the poles in an effort to get to the damaged sites faster.

“There was a lot of roof damage within the Hellshire Park community also,” said Leon Thomas, PNP councillor for the Hellshire division. He added that a church within the area had lost its roof.

A backhoe was seen in the area clearing debris from the road, sections of which resembled an obstacle course.