Show caption Damage caused by Hurricane Maria in Roseau, Dominica. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Opinion A place in the sun, in Hurricane Alley: was this my worst investment ever? David Blanchflower I flew south for the winter, and right into the path of Hurricane Irma. This was the perfect time to check the small print on the insurance policy Fri 22 Sep 2017 15.32 BST Share on Facebook

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After 28 winters in New England we decided it was time to become snowbirds, heading south in winter. I broke my ankle a couple of years ago on the ice and can no longer rush off to the ski slopes. Minus 40C looks singularly less attractive than heading south for the winter, so in June we finally bought ourselves a vacation home on Sanibel Island in Florida.

It is a barrier island, with maximum elevation of about 6ft above sea level. Houses built in the last few decades, including ours, are on stilts. The plan was to spend a large part of my sabbatical there this year. We were all set to drive down to arrive on Sunday 13 September.

Then Hurricane Irma appeared in the Caribbean and headed our way. Irma was the big sister of Harvey, the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Wilma in 2005. Irma devastated Houston, Texas, a few weeks ago and killed scores of people in the US. Estimates are that it will have knocked half a percent from US GDP in 2017, although the economics of disasters means that rebuilding may boost GDP in 2018 and beyond.

We put our plans on hold and watched as a category 5 hurricane headed our way. Our beautiful island, home to the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Refuge, was the subject of a mandatory evacuation order – and even the first responders fled.

I woke on Sunday morning 13 September and looked at the Weather Channel app on my phone, which said we were forecast to get winds of 120mph-140mph and a 10ft to 15ft high storm surge. That would wipe out our house. At the very least the roof would sail away into the Gulf. We checked our insurance and worried that we hadn’t enough. This was starting to look like the worst investment of all time. But at the last minute, Irma took a hard-right turn after hitting the Florida Keys and we just got a sideswipe. It was bad enough. The storm had higher winds than the great Michael Fish one of 1987 that devastated the south-east of England and parts of France. Irma was the size of Florida, it caused floods, brought trees down and sliced roofs off homes.

The first bit of good news for us was that the bridges leading to our island survived unscathed. Then they opened the island: Sanibel was saved. After a couple of days, the water came back with boil orders for drinking, as did the sewage, and the power crews showed up. At one point there were 25 electricity company crews working on our little island. Ten days later, 96% of the residents have power, including us, and the boil order was removed. We survived OK, but others weren’t so lucky. Hurricanes Irma and Maria didn’t turn away from them.

If the US is looking vulnerable to hurricane damage in this stormy year, the situation in some of the neighbouring Caribbean islands is completely disastrous. Many of these islands are being smashed a second time by Irma’s big sister, Maria. In the US Virgin Islands St John is dirt brown, its vegetation gone, and St Thomas has been wrecked. The little island of Dominica was blasted as were St Croix and Guadeloupe. People have died. Livelihoods are lost; tourists surely aren’t coming back any time soon. This is a disaster that is going to take years to fix.

At the time of writing, nobody on the US territory of heavily indebted Puerto Rico has power and it may be many months before they get it back. They can’t just bring in power crews with all the modern equipment and rebuild; they simply lack the resources.

The French president, Emmanual Macron, has already promised help for the French territories of St Barts and the French portion of St Martin. The Dutch have sent help to the Dutch part of the same island where a third of buildings have been destroyed. These tropical holiday paradises have, in a matter of days, been turned into disaster zones.

For independent islands such as Nevis and St Kitts, there is no big brother to come to the rescue. And don’t rely on the tax-dodging billionaires who have exiled themselves in the region to cough up and help. Many of the people who actually live on the islands have nowhere to go. Richard Branson is right when he says the British Virgin Islands need the equivalent of a Marshall Plan to rebuild, but so too do many of the other islands. No power, no water, no roof. No water is bad enough but that translates for many to no cash, no job and no economy.

Irma and Harvey together are probably going to knock at least a percentage point off US GDP in 2017. Jobs have been lost and there has already been an uptick in initial claims for unemployment benefits in the Houston area. But at least Florida and Houston will get their US federal government aid, which has already been approved by Congress. The economic and humanitarian effects on the Caribbean islands that depend on tourism will be even greater.