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Jagged shards of splintered glass hung from the frames of shattered French windows of oceanfront condos at Windsor Village, which bore the brunt of the damage from Hurricane Beryl on Thursday.
Storm surge battered down shutters and inundated homes closest to the waterfront at the complex on South Church Street.
“This was all nature,” a bewildered woman marvelled as she stood in the sand-blasted spot where her sofa had been the night before.
“The couch was just here, the television was on the wall there,” she added, gesturing to the rubble-strewn room. A pair of seascape paintings miraculously still hung in place amid the wreckage.
The rest of the furniture had been flung across the living space and lay in a haphazard pile in the kitchen.
Waves swamp ground floor
“I knew this might not be a safe place so I stayed elsewhere,” said the woman, who asked not to be named, as she gathered the rest of her belongings to load in her vehicle. She said she would be finding somewhere else to stay in the short term, with the bulk of the home exposed to the elements.
There were similar scenes at several of the waterfront condos. Waves had breached a low seawall and demolished plywood barriers or shutters covering windows.
In one apartment a stand up paddleboard lay amid debris. In another, a barbecue was heaped in a corner among assorted furniture.
On one only a handful of properties, the plywood boarding or hurricane shutters had stayed in place through the night. Behind one of those was Ekaterina Dementieva, who had stayed in the property throughout the night with her husband.
She told the Compass it had been a worrying night for her and her husband, and they tried to take their minds off the storm by watching films.
But it wasn’t until the flood water cleared and she stepped outside and saw her neighbours’ properties, that she realised quite how close to disaster they had been.
“When we walked around we understood how terrible it had been in the night.”
Asked if they would stay at Windsor Village again during a hurricane, she replied, “No, no, definitely not.”
She added that she feared the each successive storm would make a structure less secure.
The couple, who have lived Cayman for a year, have just one more month left on their lease at the apartment.
Ankle-deep water
Around the complex, people walked in ankle-deep water around the overflowing swimming pool. Some helped waterfront residents assess the level of destruction or move damaged belongings.
About eight properties in the complex appeared to have sustained serious damage to their ground floors. The bulk of the buildings remained intact, however, and the units farther back in the development seemed to be fine
One man, who stayed in his unit elsewhere in the complex overnight, said he had been surprised by the extent of the damage.
“At 5am I could hear the waves bouncing off the shutters so I knew the water had come over and was flooding inside the complex.
“I didn’t expect those oceanfront condos to be so badly hit. It was all boarded up last night. The water broke through the shutters and the boarding.”
He said he had lived in the complex for several years and been through numerous storms without suffering anything like this kind of impact.
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