The Home Journal

Storm Alert

The hurricane season formally began in the Virgin Islands on Friday. We have been so fortunate over a few decades in not being visited by a hurricane that few people give serious attention to the hurricane season any more. Many view it as something remote, as something that just can't happen here.

Although we hope and pray that the islands will remain free of hurricane, there is no telling when we may be hit by one. We therefore, have to be forever alert and to take precautions against a violent storm, else it catches us completely unprepared and causes heavier destruction than is necessary.

Almost every year we see pictures and read stories illustrating and describing the devastation and trail of death left by a hurricane somewhere in the United States or in the Caribbean. Homes are flattened or seriously damaged; people are killed and maimed, and the destruction runs into the millions. Anyone of those hurricanes could have had the Virgin Islands as its target. In fact, we have frequently been in the path of such storms, only to be spared at the eleventh hour.

But our luck may not hold out indefinitely. Some day we may be hit, and since we cannot tell whether it will be this year or the next, we have to be constantly prepared and alert during the hurricane season.

Not only must home owners make sure that their houses are well protected, but the government emergency aid program must exist in actuality and not only on paper. When and if a storm approaches, the people must be given warning, in time, and it should be possible for people to get to emergency shelters which are properly supplied.

It is imperative that hurricane workers be well organized to avoid unnecessary confusion during an emergency.

Because of the serious of housing problem we have here, with hundreds of shaky and decaying shacks, many of them packed with 7 units people, we are particularly vulnerable to a hurricane.

We can't afford to be complacent.