Alance Wisdom got inside her home just in time to watch the ceiling of her front room collapse. As the rain rushed in, a violent wind ripped at the roof, piece by piece.
“Everything just fell,” Wisdom, 79, said of the day Hurricane Beryl, the strongest July Atlantic hurricane on record, skirted Jamaica’s southern coast. “Before dark, everything was on the ground.”
The flooding destroyed nearly all of Wisdom’s belongings in the small, brightly painted home she’s lived in for more than 30 years. Below the steep hill, her house sits on, two acres of land where she grew cabbage, sweet peppers, and cucumbers were flattened.
“That’s what we depend on, and there’s nothing to sell,” she said, sitting outside her tarp-covered home on an especially hot day in late August.
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