DARK HORIZONS
A harrowing bird’s-eye view of Maria’s destruction on the coast of St. Croix.
The Caribbean had solid surf earlier in the season, but it didn’t hold a candle to this. With the trade winds down, cerulean glass met focused power radiating from Hurricane Irma toward Puerto Rico in 16-second intervals. For San Juan-based surfer Otto Flores, this was as good as it gets: late drops into dreamy, overhead caverns.
“It was like a year’s worth of great waves in a day,” Flores remembers. “When hurricane swells come from that direction, there isn’t a drop of water out of place.”
For many who live and die by Atlantic-borne swells, hurricane season is a celebration. But while a given storm system may seem like a gift for one coastal resident, it’s often a curse for another.
After his Hurricane Irma super sessions, Flores learned that the spinner that created perfect waves in Puerto Rico had all but leveled neighboring islands. Wanting to help in the recovery effort, Flores jetted to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands to meet with Jon Rose, founder of the humanitarian organization Waves For Water, who was already on the ground distributing water filters to the locals.
“To see these beautiful paradises after they’ve been hit by a Category 5 was really shocking,” says Flores. “A lot of the buildings aren’t concrete; they’re just island style. There were boats in the streets and cars flipped over. What was miraculous to me was that more people didn’t die.”
In the midst of his post-Irma effort, yet another meteorological menace came banging at the door. On September 16, Hurricane Maria became a tropical storm just east of the Lesser Antilles before entering a period of rapid intensification. Within two days it would become a Category 5, and by September 20, it would peak with wind speeds of 175 mph, making it the tenth-most intense hurricane on record.
Commercial airlines were grounded in preparation for Maria, but Flores felt
