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"Paradise Interrupted" - Photographer's Notes - Continued
Paradise was interrupted, but repairs were very quickly begun to the basic infrastructure of the island. Heroic efforts were made by crucial services such as Cayman Airways, Caribbean Utilities Company, the Water Authority, Cable and Wireless, Police and Fire departments, fuel suppliers, shipping services and numerous private and corporate donors. In the months after Ivan, the island resembled a kicked ant hill as every able body toiled in the sun to secure roofs, clean up and re-create housing. The speed of the initial clean-up was as unbelievable as the enormity of the task had been. Despite enormous damage, power and water was returned to most of the island within four months, with telephone service not far behind. During the storm, heroes appeared on demand, from both the public and private sectors. Many lives were saved by quick and decisive action as the sea came in along with walls and ceilings. The stories are too numerous to account for in this book, but ask around and you’ll hear them yourself. All who were here for it were affected with varying degrees of trauma and numerous lives were changed dramatically. Over 10,000 people left the island in the days before the storm and during the weeks just after.
Insurance companies were, with a few exceptions, generally found terribly lacking and often outrageously so. As I write this, five months after the storm, at least two thirds of all claims have yet to be paid. In my own humble opinion, there is something fundamentally wrong with the current legal requirements (or lack thereof) for local insurance companies’ abilities to pay against their liabilities as promptly as they collect customer’s payments. This clearly needs to be addressed immediately.
Ivan has been horribly photogenic (it isn’t over yet, as I write this in March, 2005). It has been gut wrenching, often depressing and at times exciting to document…when I could make the time to stop. As much as I have been able to capture, there were innumerable, obvious photo opportunities that I had to pass up on my way to do something more urgent. This was especially true in the first week, when one’s total supply of gasoline was only what had been in the tank on September 11th. Every image was made with you, the viewer in mind. Whenever I chose the decisive moment to capture, I was always imagining your reaction to what I was seeing. Many images offer lessons to be learned. Some speak far more than the proverbial “thousand words”. I began to edit this book from thousands of images and now have it down to 400. I don’t know how I’m going to edit these further. They all deserve to be seen.
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