Port St. Maarten:

The road to recovery

As is already well documented, last September’s devastating Category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, wreaked havoc across large parts of the Caribbean.

Many islands felt the full impact of either Irma or Maria and in some cases both. One of the hardest-hit of these islands was Dutch Sint Maarten/St Martin. Hurricane Irma is estimated to have caused around US$ 3 billion in damage to the island’s tourism-led economy and damaged some 70 per cent of its infrastructure.

The vast majority of the island’s cruise traffic has centred on Port St. Maarten and, as a consequence, the Dutch side of the island suffered most from the drop-off in arrivals in the wake of Irma.

Over the past 10 years or so, privately held Port St. Maarten had pursued a cruise strategy focused on attracting volume traffic and leveraging on the island’s keenly priced duty-free shopping at its attractive Harbour Point Village and duty-free capital of the Caribbean, Philipsburg. All of this was partially damaged by Irma on 6 September.

Luckily, Port St. Maarten’s cruise terminal was not quite as severely affected as some other parts of the island, but badly damaged it was. And it would be around three months after Irma before cruise ships were able to call once again.

Port St. Maarten business development officer Alex Gumbs spoke to Caribbean Maritime about the hurricane, the events of the past few months and where Port St. Maarten goes from here.

Impact

First, Mr Gumbs detailed the impact on the port’s facilities: “Damage to Pier 1 was caused by one of the expansion joints lifting. This has been repaired since the beginning of March and we are now 100 per cent operational with six berths available. One of the security screening booths for the Genesis-class ships was destroyed. This has since been restored. Wooden kiosks were damaged and these are all now repaired and open for business. In terms of cargo, there was an area at the terminal where bricks were washed away due to the high swells of 8 meters plus. There was minor electrical damage to the cranes which is now all repaired.”

Mr Gumbs said no level of planning could have anticipated a hurricane of such power and intensity. “We had contingencies in place with a well-structured hurricane plan. However, the sheer force of the storm, with winds of more than 185 mph, caused damage that no one could have prepared for.”

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