Memories of that dreadful day in early September 2004, when Hurricane Ivan caused, in the words of one Caribbean disaster official, “total devastation” of Grenada, are still painful for many Grenadians. Their Prime Minister, Keith Mitchell, whose own official residence was flattened, revealed that the cost of rebuilding after Ivan, and then Emily, (a Category1 hurricane that struck in July 2005), amounted to two and a half times the island’s GDP. Ivan itself caused damage worth US$1.1 billion, with over 90% of housing stock either damaged or destroyed. The island’s famed spice industry was dealt a terrible blow, with few nutmeg trees surviving, while 60% of cocoa trees were also uprooted. As Mitchell openly admitted: “The damage was so severe that our economy was immediately sent on a downward spiral. These hurricanes decimated our productive sectors and created a massive deficit for Government. And, of course, the most significant and tragic cost of Ivan was the impact made on human and social elements in society.”

And yet, six years on, Grenada has made a strong and noble recovery, even if it is not quite complete. Roofs on people’s houses, 90% of which were blown off, have all been restored, with just a few exceptions. Although the principal Anglican and Presbyterian churches in St George’s are still shells and the parliament building has still to be completed, the main Methodist, Pentecostal and Catholic churches in the capital all have gleaming new roofs. The Presbyterian Church will be restored once an essential new retaining wall is built.

As far as two of Grenada’s most important foreign exchange earners – tourism and spice/cocoa exports – are concerned, the news is encouraging. Hotels, many rebuilt better and stronger, are reporting good levels of occupancy, the world recession notwithstanding. Replanted nutmeg trees are bearing fruit quicker than expected. It was previously thought that seven years was required after replanting, but Roland Courtney, field officer for the Co-Operative Nutmeg Association, set the record straight. “The whole idea that seven years is needed is just not right,” Courtney says. “Some trees bear fruit in four years. Before Ivan, we had so many of them we were not paying attention to younger trees. Older trees do produce more fruit of course, but they are prone to root rot, which is killing a lot of them, while younger trees are resistant to it.”

Nutmeg export levels are still less than half what they were pre-Ivan, and Courtney thinks it will be at least a decade before they return to parity. But at least things are moving in the right direction.

The cocoa industry, which is no less important to Grenada, is recovering more quickly. Last year, more than a million pounds of cocoa were produced on the island, still short of the 1.5m lb annual pre-Ivan figure, but Andrew Hastick, general manager of the Grenada Cocoa Association, thinks that by 2012, old returns will be matched.

“I don’t think we will ever be able to replant all the cocoa trees we lost in Ivan,” he says, “but we have larger pods now and better quality. There’s less competition now for trees and more sunlight. The fine flavour of our criollo cocoa is slightly different to that produced in Jamaica, Trinidad and Venezuela. We think that ours is the best.” Also making a strong recovery are cinnamon, clove, pimento and ginger.

It’s heartening to know that businesses have found a way to move on after such devastation, but what of the individuals whose everyday lives were turned upside down when the hurricane stuck? ZiNG met three such people to find out how they coped on the day of the storm, and how life has changed for them in the last six years…

Hyacinth Francis
Hyacinth Francis, a 67-year old farmer at the time of Ivan, lost much of his livelihood. He also experienced the previous hurricane that hit Grenada – Janet – in 1955.

“Ivan was different to Janet. With Janet, the winds started blowing in the afternoon and grew and grew until they exploded at about 7pm. When morning came, the wind was still 50mph. Ivan only lasted about an hour but was stronger and the damage was worse. Which of the two was the more terrifying is difficult to say – probably Janet owing to the duration and consistency. They didn’t categorise hurricanes in those days. The trees were not as badly affected by Janet as they were by Ivan. All the leaves were stripped off, but because the trees were still standing, they grew back. And yet, unlike Ivan, we could not drive around after Janet as there was much more soil and debris lying around.  

My wife and I just stayed in the house during Ivan and prayed for the best. The roof went but everything else was OK. Luckily, my house was insured, but a lot of other ones were not. I moved in with my son, who lived next door. His roof had also blown off but was lying right by the house, so he put it back the very next day! It would be a year before my roof went back on.

As we have a stream running past the house, we had no problem with water. We cleared our road the next day and life did get back to normal after lots of clearing up. We were lucky, we had food, and as we had three generators we were able to store food for other people too. 

Most of my trees were destroyed. We had seven nutmeg trees by the house and one survived. But all 56 of those I had in St David’s were uprooted, and only three out of 48 in Constantine were left unscathed. I had eight cocoa trees producing fruit, but all were lost. All but two of my 30 or so avocado trees went, and so did most of my orange trees and all bar one of my mandarin trees. Very few of my many coconut trees survived.

I haven’t replanted any nutmegs but I have put in about 300 coconut trees and some bananas too. However, I’ve done very little farming since Ivan. Instead I’ve made a living doing different odd jobs - little things for people. I’ve even made flagpoles for one of the embassies from galvanised pipes. But the good thing is that we’ve always had food on the table, and we are thankful for that.”

Edwin Frank  
52-year-old Public Relations Officer Edwin Frank was initially dismissive of the hurricane warnings being issued in September 2004 – a decision he was later to regret.

“I recall September 7, 2004 very clearly. I don’t think anyone in Grenada will ever forget it. My wife said she would never like to experience another. Tragically, her wish was subsequently granted by our Creator, as she died before Hurricane Emily arrived ten months later. Emily was a not as severe as Ivan, which was Category 4, but it still did a whole lot of damage, Ivan left all of us in shock. We didn’t take any of the warnings seriously. For 49 years, (the previous hurricane having struck back in 1955), all we had heard was a lot of rhetoric about storm warnings. People joked that ‘God must be a Grenadian’.

The day Ivan came, people were playing football in the stadium, and when the government sent workers home early they treated it as a joke. My kids, who were 13 and nine years old at the time, were actually very excited that a hurricane was coming, eager to see what it would be like. Yet, monitoring both radio and television as I did, a strange feeling came over me that, despite having heard and seen many threats of the past simply dissipate into thin air, this was not going to be the same. The frantic calls to the media houses from listeners asking for directions to shelters confirmed that the threat was much more real. Even my dad, who was no longer with us, seemed to agree. In a brief nap that I took around mid-day, he appeared to me in a dream to warn me of the impending danger – a warning that I ignored. This was manifested in the fact that I made no preparations to survive. I simply opined that my house was built properly and that everything would be fine. How wrong I was!  

It was just after 2pm when the real character of Hurricane Ivan presented itself to the residents of Calivigny. In a sudden shift from storm-force winds to hurricane-type gusts, the sky in the area was decorated with twisted, flying galvanised sheets and clothing, among other things. The older part of my house was the first to succumb. By then, my family was clustered in the bathroom, praying non-stop and screaming at me as I made attempts to salvage some of my belongings that were already exposed to the elements. I endured those screams while bacchanalian-type activity prevailed on my roof, with items from my neighbours’ roofs pounding mine. The passing of the eye allowed us to take refuge in my Auntie’s place downstairs, she being on holiday in the UK at the time. It was the start of my longest night ever as I waited for morning to reveal Ivan’s wrath. And what a morning it was! What I saw that day will never be erased from my memory. Ninety per cent of my roof was gone. I nevertheless fared better than most of my neighbours, who lost 100% of theirs. We had no electricity for seven weeks, and it was eight months before our cable TV was restored. We always had four TVs on in the house as my wife and two kids liked to watch different programmes. The removal of TV led us to communicate better as a family, to rediscover the camaraderie that TV had taken away. I had to tell jokes as well as stories about my boyhood days. My son said he wished life was always like that, and now he doesn’t put the TV on in the week. So, despite all the havoc it wreaked, Ivan at least allowed us to touch that sentimental part of the past.

What else did Ivan do? It made us see homes we never knew were there. All the big trees were blown down, revealing lots of hidden houses. It’s amazing how in six years since, nature has brought so much vegetation back to what it was before.

Government has, however, found it hard to rebuild, and in lots of villages, houses are just as they were after Ivan.”

The Reverend Canon Christian Glasgow
Reverend Glasgow is rector of the still roofless Anglican Church in the parish of St George.

“At the time of Ivan I was based in the north of the island in Madeys, part of the parish of St Patrick. We didn’t get as much rain as the rest of Grenada, but for me the overriding memory is that of the wind. It was a driving, howling wind. Some roofs in our area were blown off, but what was noticeable was how the trees were stripped of their leaves. Many fell, especially the nutmeg.

All the churches were damaged to some degree. Everyone lost electricity, and with phone lines mangled and mobile phone networks down, communications were a real problem for people. But, by the grace of God, our phone at the rectory was one of the very few on the island that worked right the way through the hurricane, and after it. The rectory therefore acted as a relay station for calls coming in from all over the world as people tried to find out about their relatives. Word must have got around, as we had a Barbados radio station ringing in during their call-in programmes.

For the first week or so after Ivan, we had to ferry messages to people using our Isuzu vehicle, although the roads were quite rough. It took a while before land lines were restored, and a few days before the mobile network was back up.

I experienced a curious sense of nostalgia in the time after Ivan, as people did things they had not done for some time. They used the river for washing, and cooked over open fires, bringing back memories of my childhood in St Vincent which I’d almost forgotten. People got together to help with all sorts of things, especially in the countryside. Many found it a time of bonding, spending quality time with each other and no longer lost in their individual worlds. I recall standing on the patio with my wife and looking at the stars and reminiscing. When we first got a generator we said we should turn off the lights as they were too bright.  

What was heart-warming was the outpouring of support from the international community in terms of financial and material aid, food and personnel. Utility companies from several Caribbean islands gave help for the next six months or more, while Trinidad and Venezuela assisted with security and clear-up. Our overseas companion dioceses were very sympathetic, and Calgary in Canada, our most immediate, was very helpful both with finances and providing work teams. They are still sending work teams of between ten and twenty people, many of them volunteers working under the direction of a skilled person, doing jobs like painting. 

For those of us in the Anglican Church, we got together with our bishop and looked at the way forward. As all the churches on the island had been damaged it was necessary to think over our whole approach for the rebuilding process. We have 22 Anglican ones, the Roman Catholics have 30-35, and there were those of  the Seventh Day Adventists, Methodists, evangelicals and spiritual baptists. The top priority was to rebuild people’s homes and the schools. We took the decision to re-roof the smaller churches before the bigger ones as they were cheaper and, once repaired, would give a sense of hope. Now, all of our efforts are on the main church here in St George’s, where we are very conscious of its historical nature – it has many marble stones commemorating the various events in the history of Grenada. Its clock, which dates back to 1904, wasn’t damaged by Ivan, and people said that hearing it strike every quarter of an hour, as it always has done, gave them hope after the hurricane.

It’s a three-to four-year project for the restoration of the church’s roof, interior and its outbuildings, although we hope to have it open by the end of 2011. Until then, we are using the school hall next door to the church for Sunday mass, and the little chapel for weekday services. We are sending teams overseas to fund raise as we need to find a minimum of EC$2m (US$736,000) for the reconstruction and refurbishment costs. Any donations would be tremendously welcome. To make one, please email me at this address: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it