ALLIGATOR POND, Manchester — Residents of Alligator Pond in southern Manchester who refused to comply with an evacuation order as Category 4 Hurricane Beryl approached the seaside town on Wednesday say they do not regret their decision, even after the harrowing experience of the cyclone’s destructive fury.

“I decided I wasn’t leaving. If me fi dead, me a dead a mi yard,” Rosalee Brown told the
Jamaica Observer on Thursday as she shared the trauma of watching her son trying to secure the roof of their house as the storm unleashed heavy rain and wind.

“My son was up on the housetop in the lightning and breeze. Nuh care how me bawl for him to come down him seh ‘Mommy, me nah come down. When your housetop gone how are you going to manage?’ One of the zinc [sheets] hit him and he fell on the ladder [but] he still decided to hold the housetop with the rope,” she told the
Observer.

Brown, who was one of many residents whose roofs were gutted during the storm, said she and her family came close to death’s door.

“I sat down and I prayed and I said ‘God, help him [her son]’,” Brown shared, adding that at one point her son had told her to leave the house.

“I said to him ‘Me nah leave the yard, if a so, the whole a we a dead in yah’,” Brown related.

Her niece, Susan, described the storm as “terrible” but said their decision to defy the evacuation order was justified.

“If we did leave Alligator Pond we wouldn’t know how down here would stay. We lost our housetop, I don’t regret it. If I had left Alligator Pond and go over to New Forest I would have been fretting about down here,” she said.

Unlike Susan and her aunt, a family of three was left with just the foundation of what was once a two-bedroom board house.

The family
— a man, the mother of his child, and his two-year-old son
— had to seek refuge from strong winds in a concrete bathroom with slab roof for close to two hours during the hurricane.

“You just look and see wind passing… through the window. When the corner of the house flip we ran outside and into the bathroom,” he said.

Fisherman Austin Brown painted a grim picture of the community.

“The storm was very bad, it mash up a lot of places down here, it took off a lot of roofs. I never know seh a so the storm did dangerous. The sea rise and you just a hear the sea a roll like rolling calf. A lot of people are homeless right now. In the village almost every housetop gone,” he said.

“From three o’clock until about after five o’clock we go through it very hard. All that was going through my mind is that my house shoulda deck and I pray to God to hurry up and make it pass. Sorry for the people whose house lick down flat, only the foundation leave,” he said, adding that he didn’t evacuate the area as he needed to secure his house.

“… You know people not going to run leave their place just like that. You have your things in your place and your valuables, you not going to really run like that,” he said.