ST. MARTIN -- Ten days after Hurricane Irma turned St. Martin into a jigsaw of ripped metal and shattered wood, residents were still struggling with an existential question: Should they cling to an island that can barely support life or start over elsewhere?
Irma hit the shared Dutch and French Caribbean island as a Category 5 hurricane with winds in excess of 200 miles an hour, turning the picturesque tourist haven into a sweltering trash heap without power, water or communications. What the hurricane didn’t steal, looters often did.
On Friday night, Yvanna and Theodore DeWeever — a young married couple — had collapsed onto the deck chairs of Royal Caribbean’s Majesty of the Seas that has been running missions of mercy, helping evacuate people from hard-hit Caribbean islands to Puerto Rico.
Read more at our news partner, the Miami Herald.