Frederiksted is used to tourists, of course, but the groups gathered around the north side of town Thursday looking over the devastation caused by Wednesday’s unprecedented rainfall were very different than the gaily clad, raucous crowds that pour off of cruise ships on a regular basis.
In groups of two and three and four, Thursday’s visitors stepped gingerly over the debris and around detours caused by cuts eroded in the beach. And they all said much the same thing.
"I’ve never seen anything like this, nothing."
One older gentleman, sitting with a friend on the guardrail near Fort Frederik, put it best: "Moving water … When water moves and it comes to something that it can’t go around or it can’t go under or over, it moves it. It just goes through," he said.
And that was apparent all across the stretch of beach extending north from Fort Frederik. While the town of Frederiksted itself seemed fine and businesses continued as usual, from Lagoon Street north was a scene of mud and erosion. A 20-foot gap had been cut across the Fort Frederik Beach, and the road and parking had collapsed where the road runs past the ballpark. Traffic was limited to one lane with barriers set out, but even that was optimistic, because water had undercut some of the remaining pavement.
One man passing by where the collapsed pavement was shook his head and said with disgust, "They’ll leave it this way four years, then fix it. You watch, it’ll take them four years to fix this."
Lilyann Rodriguez, who has lived on St. Croix all 31 years of her life, said she had always enjoyed coming to the park
"This has always been such a beautiful beach," she said, her voice filled with disbelief. She pointed to the lifeguard stand, lying on its side a dozen feet or more from where it always stood. She was standing at the bathing house, where water had undercut the pavement and the sidewalk that ran around it, cutting a furrow across the lawn and down to the ocean.
Morishka Maynard said she had come over from her home on the east side of St. Croix to view the damage, and she shook her head, repeating the oft-heard mantra, "I’ve never seen anything like this."
For Langdon Lawrence, visiting the battered beach was actually a respite. He lives in the La Grange area, where the damage was severe. His own house had been flooded, he said, but he was planning to spend the night there, because there was no place else to go.
"It’s just me and my woman, we’ll be all right," he said.
One older woman, who did not want to reveal her name, found the idea of Wednesday’s storm being called a "biblical flood" more than a metaphor.
Standing ramrod straight, she pointed her umbrella first to the battered beach, then to the sky, she said, "The man up there can’t be fooled. People ought to read their Bibles and digest it."
And in one of those scenarios that are too pat to be true, but it really happened, as this reporter drove away and headed home, over the eastern sky shown a rainbow, which as any reader of Genesis will recall was God’s promise not to destroy the world by flood a second time.
