pgtips

There was a terrible storm in St Lucia which lasted for nearly 24 hrs causing severe flooding and some structural damage. 5 islanders are also reported to have lost their lives. Can anyone who is currently on the island shed any further light ? have you been directly affected ?

Pistolpete2

The weather system that passed through St Lucia, impacting also St Vincent and Dominica in particular, was a deep trough which started with extremely heavy rain early on Christmas Eve morning and mostly continued as extremely heavy rain for that 24 hours.

There was widespread flooding and water associated damage but few landslides. I would guess that we received over 12 inches of rain in our locality.

We lost power late on Christmas Eve but it was restored in our area early on Christmas Day.

Water was restored on the evening of the 29th but there is now low pressure in the pipes and poor quality water. Many have had to have water trucked into their areas.

There has been finger-pointing regarding the alerts of this weather system, some saying that weather radar was 'down' which the weather people who do ongoing advisories in Martinique categorically deny. In my opinion all weather advisories in St Lucia are a joke anyway and we can expect partly cloudy weather 365 days a year from the forecasts .

Whatever, the lack of advisories caused many to be cut-off both at work in Castries and up north in Rodney Bay doing their usual last-minute Christmas shopping and then having to find a haven to huddle overnight because the bridges at Bois D'Orange and Choc were 'down' for a while but are back in service now and few if any buses were running.

In addition, apparently, the Virgin flight coming in from Tobago?? for onwards to Gatwick was not alerted regarding the state of the end of the runway which was effectively a river and suffered damage to its undercarriage and needed an emergency landing.

Things are now getting back to normal. Between here and Castries there is little evidence of debris but a lot of mud but the Cul de Sac branch of the supermarket Super J was engulfed (as in Hurricane Tomas) and is still out of action as a clean-up continues.

As before, the Bexon area and Ravine Poisson was badly hit, but loss of life has been reported as sometimes being due to individuals trying to save their animals and a police officer was killed when a wall collapsed on him in Vieux Fort.

From what I could see, as with a lot of foul weather in September and October which involves extensive very heavy rain, this is typically due to weather systems brewing up in the Amazon which then head north into our area and collide with the prevailing trades??? and cause a great deal of precipitation when they hit the higher elevations of the islands of the Lesser Antilles. In this case, flooding was island-wide with the north getting hit first and the south - who initially thought they had been spared - later.

pgtips

Thanks for all that info Pete. I am glad you are OK.

Pistolpete2

Thanks pg!

2014 is another year - make it a good one!

twostars

I think that's a really good summary. I was in Castries that afternoon, luckily I left around 3 just before it started getting bad, but some streets were already flooded.

I would add that part of the road to Vieux Fort (via Dennery) was washed away, but they've made a detour so you can get through. I went down to Vieux Fort this weekend and they still didn't have water. Bexon looked really bad when we passed through, with lots of banana plants down and people's destroyed belongs set out by the roadside. Mud everywhere. Also, the bridges at Piaye and Canaries were washed away and Canaries and Anse la Raye were heavily affected, but the bridge at Canaries has since been reestablished.