In the storm-hit fishing villages of Barbados, what recovery truly looks like

By the Climate Centre

The Red Cross in Barbados is helping fishermen who lost everything in Hurricane Beryl last year rebuild their traditional Caribbean fish pots.

Actually rectangular baited traps made from chicken wire and tree branches, the fish pots are regarded as more sustainable than nets and less work than going out to sea every day with a line.  

“They’re a really important part of local tradition that we’re trying to preserve,” explains Kiri Lizama, Barbados Red Cross Programmes and Operations Manager.

“A fisherman could have up to ten fish pots in the water at once,” she adds, but with Beryl – the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record – people did not have time to get their fish pots out of the water and safely ashore.

“That was quite unexpected and a lot of them would have lost all their fish pots,” Lizama tells IFRC Americas Region Director Loyce Pace, on a visit earlier this month to one fishing community, Half Moon Fort in St Lucy parish, where the work of rebuilding fish pots is well underway.

Raw materials

Hurricane Beryl passed 80 miles south Barbados “causing devastating damage to the island’s fishing industry,” the IFRC said last year; significant damage was caused to over 200 fishing boats and 20 were sunk.

The Red Cross has been supporting the fishing families with the raw materials to rebuild, using the traditional skills that Lizama explains are handed down from generation to generation in Barbadian coastal villages.

The fish pots are stationed on reefs, rather than sand, and can trap a large variety of local types, including barbers, grunts, snappers, chutes and queen mullets.

The fishermen use a combination of GPS and simple triangulation of onshore features to identify the best locations to set the traps and find them again.  

“One year after Hurricane Beryl swept through the Caribbean, communities in Barbados are showing what recovery truly looks like,” the IFRC said last week on social media.

Unprecedented timing

The work is one element of the Barbados Red Cross recovery programme for communities affected by Hurricane Beryl that has also included cash payments for fish-processing households, essential WASH supplies, and shelter and volunteer management, according to a new IFRC update for the region.

IFRC-DREF initially allocated 1.7 million Swiss francs to support response by the relevant National Societies, including in Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and an emergency appeal was then launched for 4 million CHF to assist 25,000 people in these countries.

Beryl’s intensity in terms of windspeed and barometric pressure was not unprecedented, but its timing was, the Climate Centre’s Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a lecturer at Columbia University specializing in remote sensing and early warning, wrote last year.

“An additional cause for concern is that Beryl joins the ranks of destructive storms that intensified very rapidly, posing a challenge to preparedness even with the best forecasts science can provide.”

It only took Beryl 40 hours to go from a tropical depression to a Category 3 hurricane – tripling its maximum wind speed to at least 180kph as it did so.

Kiri Lizama (centre), Barbados Red Cross Programmes and Operations Manager, with IFRC Americas Region Director Loyce Pace, in Half Moon Fort, St Lucy, where the work of rebuilding fish pots with Red Cross assistance is underway. (Video still: IFRC via social media)