Express Concern for Those Left Behind : Stranded Tourists Leave Jamaica--Sadly

As the airport here reopened Friday, some among the thousands of tourists stranded when Hurricane Gilbert devastated the island Monday expressed concern for the battered Jamaican people they will leave behind.

“The people here have been so wonderful we feel guilty about our relatively privileged position,” said jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, who was vacationing with his wife, Franca, at the luxurious Round Hill Hotel near here when the storm approached.

The Mulligans were evacuated to the home of a Jamaica resident, Nigel Pemberton, to ride out the storm and returned to find their cottage at the resort hotel demolished by the storm.

Part of Roof Blows Off

“Part of the roof of our host’s house came off in the storm, but we were lucky. All around us, the people in smaller houses and on farms were wiped out,” Mulligan said as he edged forward in a seemingly endless line to the American Airlines ticket counter. The Mulligans also were lucky enough to get aboard one of the first planes to the mainland.

Not so lucky were Gerry and Sande Claxton, newlyweds from Fresno, who stood amid piles of luggage in the sweltering, overcrowded air terminal hoping for standby space on any departing flight. But they too appeared more concerned with the plight of the Jamaicans than with their own discomfort.

“You feel awful when you see what’s coming here,” said Sande, a registered nurse. “They’re going to have rampant disease and all kinds of other problems because there is no clean water, no electric power for refrigeration, nothing.”

“In some places we drove past on the way to the airport this morning the stench was almost overpowering,” said her husband, a mechanical engineer.

Urges Sending Foodstuff

“Americans should send canned food, especially canned meats, like tuna, because there is no refrigeration here,” said Franca Mulligan. “In one week there could be panic here.”

At Montego Bay’s Donald Sangster International Airport on Friday, thousands of stranded travelers, scores of them honeymooning American couples who spent the last four days sleeping on hotel lobby floors, clamored to find space on the half-dozen U.S.-bound airliners, among the first to leave Jamaica since the storm struck.

Jamaica Tourist Board officials estimated that about 10,000 tourists, 70% of them Americans, were stranded in the island’s main holiday hotels along the north coast when the storm hit. While there were no reports of deaths or injuries among them, most have suffered the dirt and discomfort of ruined hotel rooms, no water or electricity and increasingly skimpy meals served by loyal hotel workers who have suffered far greater losses than their guests.

Beth and Jim Hamelin, another newlywed couple from Rochester, N.Y., said they rode out Hurricane Gilbert in a hotel lobby that “looked like downtown Beirut on a bad day, but the waiters were still decorating the tables for lunch.”

Limits to Drinking

“Everyone drank a lot,” Beth said, “but you couldn’t get drunk because every time you looked out a window you knew you were in so much trouble you sobered up.”

At the Seagarden Beach Resort near Montego Bay, Thelma Toms and Lois Worden of Philadelphia said they were shuttled from building to building during the storm as hotel workers scrambled vainly to settle them in one whose roof would resist the wind.

“When the roof came off one, we would move to another,” Toms said.

John and Linda Kennan, both Dow-Corning chemists from Midland, Mich., said they already had enjoyed a honeymoon week and were due to go home the day the storm struck. For a lark, on the day before the storm, they visited Carinosa Gardens, a botanic and bird life preserve established near Ocho Rios by Prime Minister Edward Seaga.

‘Windows Popping in Wind’

“We thought it was all in fun when we saw them chase down the geese and swans and emu and put them safely indoors,” Linda said. “But it wasn’t funny the next day when we sat in the hotel corridor and listened to windows popping out in the wind,” John said.

“We have to compliment the people here,” he added. “They took care of the tourists before they took care of their own homes and families.

“Their big question everywhere we went after the storm was to ask us if we will come back to Jamaica. I think we will. But I don’t think we’ll ever come in September, and I’m going to underline the part in the tourist guidebook about ‘hurricane season.’ ”