JUNCTION, St Elizabeth — The scale of the devastation unleashed by Category 4 Hurricane Beryl on St Elizabeth started to emerge late last week as residents of Junction and neighbouring districts started recovery activities in an effort to return their lives to some level of normalcy.

On Friday, Primrose Smalling, a resident of Top Hill near Junction, told the Jamaica Observer that she has been left her in a tight spot, having lost her roof.

“Usually I lose a few sheets of zinc, nothing like this… One occasion before I lost three sheets of zinc. The solitex never moved, so it wasn’t as devastating as now,” she said.

“I just put my faith in God and say this is it. My neighbours called me in the night and told me that the roof is gone. I just said to myself this is my time now,” Smalling told the
Sunday Observer while watching her son trying to place a tarpaulin over a section of the house.

“Right now we are just trying to secure one room with a tarpaulin and put the things in there. I have lost everything
— settee, the things in the kitchen. The stove is full of water; it is sad, but I just have to trust in God. I am just hoping that I will get help and that everything can be put back together,” she said.

Shanette Rochester, who lives in Dunder Hill, related her harrowing experience during the passage of the hurricane last Wednesday.

“It was horrible, because we have never experienced anything like this before. I was taking it lightly, to be honest, because we didn’t batten down our windows. When we were there and we saw the breeze and how strong it was we were trying to hold the windows. We couldn’t hold them any longer, they just shattered on us,” she said, while pointing to neighbours whose windows, although battened down before the storm, were also damaged and roofs ripped off.

“It is only a pity for some who don’t have it, so we are just waiting on a trade man to give us an estimate to go to the hardware to get it repaired,” she added.

“We were in the bedroom and we had to move to the dining hall area and then the zinc there went too. The whole experience was horrible,” Rochester said.

Simone, a bar operator in Shaddock Hill, Bull Savannah, a few miles south of Junction, described her experience as “terrible”.

“We had very heavy rain. Many people lost their roofs. For me, I had to stand at my door and hold it to stop the wind from opening it, so that water don’t come in. The way the breeze was powerful, from three o’ clock to eight o’ clock was terrible. This was worse than hurricanes Ivan and Dean,” she said.

“We don’t know when we going to see back electricity. From the storm happen nobody not interested to drink. Dem stress out over their houses weh mash up. The money that they have now they are going to have to use it to put back zinc [on their roofs],” she added.

Generators are now in high demand in St Elizabeth with scores of residents also lining up at service stations in Junction to get diesel and petrol for the units. The damage to utility poles in the southern parish is also said to be the worst when compared to other parishes