Hurricane OMAR - October 16-17, 2008

While most of the damage to St. Croix was related to downed trees / branches and to many of the boats in our harbors, the island experienced widespread power outages after the storm hit on Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

St. Croix is a lush and green island with many large and beautiful trees. The down side of this is that when there is a wind storm event, with tons of rain, many power lines that are running through trees will suffer some kind of damage and will result in power outages. Most power outages were corrected soon after the storm, but in some areas of the island, it took days, and even weeks, to repair completely. Several small pockets around the island did not have power two weeks after the storm, but the power company is worked hard to get everything back online.

There was almost no structural damage to buildings and homes on the island. HOORAY!!! In  the first couple of days, great progress was made cleaning up the debris from downed tree branches, etc. WAPA, our power company, brought in extra people from St. Thomas and St. John to help with the effort to restore power to those areas of the island that were still in the dark. The people of St. Croix all came come together to get the island back to normal and all should be very proud of the way everyone has pitched in to help!

Hurricane OMAR was a relatively small and compact hurricane, it was non-the-less a serious storm, more serious than people realized at first... but it could have been MUCH worse! Read this account of Hurricane Hugo, which devastated the island in 1989,  Nightmare on St. Croix.