Lightning and Fire in English Harbour

By David H. Lyman

“We were all a little shaken up by that little storm,” Libby told me on the phone, a week after tropical storm Philippe rampaged through English Harbour on the island of Antigua. Libby Nicholson grew up in English Harbour and is today the architect and hostess at Pineapple House, a cottage colony guest house for yacht crews as well as an Airbnb. It overlooks the yacht club docks. “The funny thing was,” she added, “Philippe was not supposed to be very powerful or strong, so a lot of us kind of ignored it.

“‘Oh,’ they all said. ‘it’s heading east. It’s going out to sea, so we’re going to be fine.’

“Then it sort of began getting closer. It kind of veered into Antigua. Honestly, it felt like it was right above us. All of a sudden, the amount of rain falling from the clouds was almost overwhelming!

“The rumbling thunder was deafening and seemed to roll on for a whole minute at a time while flashes of lightning lit the whole sky blue with electricity. It was quite spectacular as well as very scary. The lightning never stopped! It felt like the earth was shaking. Is that possible?”

Philippe, downgraded from a hurricane, arrived over Antigua the night of October 2. The gale winds were southerly. The rain was intense.

“I’m not making this up,” Libby said. “The thunder was so close, it was reverberating, shaking the buildings. The amount of rain falling from the sky, driven by the wind, had me concerned about a mud slide sending me and Pineapple House sliding down the hillside down into the harbor.”

Libby and most of the island had retired that evening, confident the storm would bypass them. “I was lying in bed around eight o’clock, thinking,” she told me, “ ‘Okay, everything’s quiet. There’s nothing happening.’ But by ten o’clock, all hell was breaking loose. That’s how quickly it started. And by then, it was like, ‘Oh my God, where are we going with this?’

“When you’re in a storm like this,” she added, “you don’t really know when it’s going to end or how bad it will become. You are in sort of a bubble that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. When will it burst? 

“It must have been around 10 p.m. when a blinding flash of lightning, with an immediate clap of thunder, shook the house. I heard a transformer on a nearby pole explode. The lights went out. I heard the generators in the nearby Antigua Yacht Club Marina kick in. That lasted only a few minutes, for another flash of lightning must have struck a utility pole nearby, and the surge of electrical power must have overloaded the generators and knocked them off.

“ ‘ Oh, that’s not good,’ ” I said. “But nothing was good. We were now entering survival mode. By now, I was soaking wet. The wind was blowing the rain sideways. Lightning-lit blue light filled the world in which we were living.

“In the middle of a panicked moment, I realized I was wearing all my silver bracelets on both arms. I had the sudden feeling that these coils of silver might attract lightning and hurriedly stripped off all my bracelets. I noticed two mirrors on the other side of the bedroom. You know that West Indian Caribbean myth? If lightning is reflected by a mirror, it will attract more lightning. I covered them with a towel.

“I asked Plumber, the Pineapple House handyman, to turn off our breakers, even though the power was down, for safety sake. He and I then retreated to one of the more secure rooms with cement walls in a dryer, safer place under the main house, as far away from the storm as we could get. We found and turned on a few battery-operated camp lamps so we could see.

“Sometime later, who knows how long it was, mixed in with the thunder, wind, and pounding rain, I heard the sounds of snaps and crackling coming from the harbour.”

“Somewhere, there was a fire.”

Fire!

By two that morning, the Antigua Yacht Club Marina Center was engulfed in a devastating fire. Flames, whipped by the winds, were sent out into the night sky and out over the harbor. Rain poured down from the heavens, but the fire was too intense for any amount of rain to put it out.

Maurice Belgrave, a local diver, along with the Antigua Fire Brigade, worked the rest of the night and into the morning to bring the fire under control. By morning, exhausted and defeated, the firefighters had lost the battle. The entire building collapsed. What was left was the mere skeleton of charred, weakened cement columns.

“That next day,” Libby said, “as I wandered through my village, I was met with an eerie sight. The skeleton of the center was all that remained.” Cloggy’s Restaurant, The Skullduggery’s pub, the Sea Breeze Cafe, the Turtle Surf Shop, BWA’s offices, Ari’s Fresh Fish Shop, the workout gym, and Dockside Liquors and Grocery Store — all gone in a single night.

The English Harbour community began to emerge, rally together, and bring support to one another. “We all became very close,” Libby said. “As if we aren’t already a close-knit group of islanders. This loss brought out compassionate support and a genuine sense of community.”

Days later, with the site still smoldering, I called Shaun Falcone, the marina’s manager. The story began to unfold.

“The fire started in the marina office,” he told me. “Perhaps around midnight. There was a major power surge that blew out the electronic network in our office that controls the security camera systems, internet, and phone lines.”

By two in the morning, when emergency responders arrived, the harbor end of the building was totally engulfed. The fire lasted all night and into the next morning. “Flames kept erupting even five days later,” said Shaun.

The marine operation was unaffected. None of the yachts berthed nearby were touched. The docks still had fuel and electricity. Shaun and the crew moved the marina office to an adjacent building, into what most people call the Panerai lounge, as the Italian-Swiss watchmaker Panerai used to be there. More recently Locman, the Italian watchmaker, took over the space, next to a fabric boutique. This single-story building was spared the blaze, but one side was scorched by the fire, said. The nearby yacht club house was also unaffected. The gale-force winds were southerly, blowing the flames out over the harbor. One hates to contemplate that had the winds blown from the opposite direction, the flames would have engulfed the adjacent resort and condos on the hillside.

Shaun told me they already have plans to rebuild, although it is just a concept right now. “We hope to have something in place in time for the Antigua Yacht Charter Show in early December 2024,” he said.

 “I’ll meet you at the Sea Breeze,” used to be a common phrase in English Harbour. 

Expat Alison Sly-Adams, president of Antigua Sailing Week, told me, “The Sea Breeze Cafe and Skullduggery Cafe have always been a place for locals and expats to meet and mingle.” The dinghy dock is always jam-packed with RIBs; the tables on the Sea Breeze deck are crowded with locals, yacht crews, and cruisers, many of whom are busy on their laptops and phones. You can get the password for the WiFi network for the price of a beer or iced tea.

With the center gone, at least for now, people will need a new hub in English Harbour. For now, it will be the Cork & Basket in the main Antigua Yacht Club Marina building and Bar-B’s & Club House, the restaurants located at Antigua Yacht Club House, next door, until the Marina Center comes back. Cloggy’s has found a new home across the bay at the Catamaran Marina

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