leave st. thomas or st. john and ended up going to puerto rico and have now had to endure yet another hurricane in puerto rico. yeah. those people left and some went to puerto rico and some went to st. croix. what s your message to people either haven t been to the islands or don t have a sense of what it s like to live through one of these storms and have to literally pick up the pieces of your home, of your life? yeah. it s all about starting over. i was able to be down there and go around and see the kind of destruction that was going on in st. thomas and st. john. people were upbeat, but they are fighting hard to rebuild their lives. so people are resilient, but they re going to need our help. as remote as it is down there, it s hard to get relief
electricity back up. you can get poles back up, so that s one step. and then also just making sure that people have the proper housing, that the house something safe is another factor of this. let s listen to the governor, and this is from thursday. take a listen. we have already put on the ground on st. thomas 100,000 cases of water, and we have five c-17s sitting on the ground in st. croix and the marines and the army folks are offloading them and you see the choppers and planes bringing them here. we are getting the supplies out. and some folks still have not been attended to and i will concede that is accurate and that s common with a disaster of this size. sounds like the preparations were there. what do you think allowed the
support and the aid from the federal government the states have, and now it s that fight to not be forgotten. there s another hurricane coming. we are telling everybody to get in shelters if you are on st. thomas or st. john, go to st. croix because there s a hurricane coming to the islands directly on tuesday. let s talk about st. martin, which has been utterly devastated by the storm. what is the status of barbuda? has anybody been able to go back? as you mentioned at the top of the segment, there s not that many habitatents there. you are trying to figure out how to return home if that s possible. we know the virgin islands because it s a u.s. territory,
almost a direct hit. we lost hospitals. we lost our police station, fire station, airports, everything on the island of st. thomas and especially st. john. thank god st. croix is still there and that is the base camp. people are mostly going to st. croix? a lot are going to the mainland. because we are u.s. citizens, people are able to move there. jordan, your reporting has been spectacular on what is going on as well. talk a little bit about what the recovery is going to require in order for the u.s. virgin islands to come back? when i was down on the island, fema said it was going to be a year s long recovery and not months or weeks. one thing they need is the
parts of cars, parts of homes just torn up, like a sandwich. it s really insane. i covered harvey, in texas, and just the physical destruction in st. thomas and st. john right now, and and the ecological destruction is like nothing i have seen yet. and the rebuilding is going to take so long. in some places we heard the power is not going to be on for six months, not six days, six months. i spoke to another family in the piece and they said they don t feel they ll have power for eight months. they live farther inland. they re not sure. antonia, the woman you showed, her daughter got blown out of the bedroom. what happened? her dog was blown out of the home. both sides of the apartment the walls ripped off, 200-mile-per-hour winds and water ripped through, her small puppy just flew right out the window, the door, the wall, into the rubble outside.