Flattened buildings, debris, a lack of water, fuel and food: after the storm wreaked havoc on the islands, Ed Pilkington asks survivors why they stayed put

Even before you reach Marathon, the signs aren’t good. As you drive down US 1, flanked on either side by a paradoxically mirror-glass sea, strange objects start to appear on the side of the road, an array of Irma’s playthings.

There’s a gas station that’s been entirely flattened, fridges, garden sheds, canoes and a jet ski, all skewed at odd angles.

Part of the road has simply disappeared into the sea, and this being Florida, there’s a giant plastic dinosaur strewn across a lane and a sign saying “God cares” lying on its back.

None of that prepares you for Marathon. A Cessna plane in the tiny airport that marks the entrance to the Key is doing a good impression of a dead seagull, flipped on its back.

On the southern side of town, by the water, where Irma landed in the early hours of Sunday morning as a roaring category 4 hurricane, the scenes of devastation are almost beyond realistic. It is as if an artist had been commissioned to create an installation depicting Armageddon, Florida style.

Trees are down, a roof lies quizzically on its own without the house beneath it, a golf buggy is torn and twisted and covered in seaweed. Everywhere are scattered intimate personal possessions of the local residents, as though Irma had called, grabbed anything at hand, then flung it in fury all around.

There’s a bottle of Chardonnay, remarkably still intact, a tool kit and a fishing rod. The back window of a house has been torn out, allowing a view directly into the bedroom, a museum piece of life before the hurricane came, complete with bedroom TV and perfume bottles still standing on the dresser. Outside, several vinyl records, stripped of their sleeves, have been placed on the beach, including You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone and this one: “The wedding ceremony. Paul and Ruth 11/5/55”.

Amid such devastation, the knowledge is that there is worse further down the road, where at this point the media are still unable to go. A few miles further down US 1 is Cudjoe Key, where the eye of Irma passed overhead, and further still Key West, where people are stranded with virtually no water, fuel or food, no functioning sewerage treatment or phone contact and with the water pipelines that served them from Florida City cracked.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Damage from Hurricane Irma in Marathon, Florida. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

Help is now arriving, with a convoy of 20 white Fema Urban Search and Rescue trucks assembled in Marathon and ready to go down the road to encounter the unknown. Army vehicles are arriving too, and a constant stream of fire and police cars, their emergency lights blazing.

But with up to 42 bridges between Marathon and Key West that might not be structurally sound, getting to those in direst need is proving slow work. To that add the peril of numerous downed electricity poles, and sharp debris in the water, making arrival by boat impossible.

This is the “humanitarian crisis” that the authorities have warned is unfolding in the lower Florida Keys, where by some estimates as many as 10,000 people may have decided to ignore the ubiquitous orders to evacuate and ride out one of the most powerful storms in living memory.

It raises the question: why? Why would anyone choose to stay put in a community where the land at some points is only a few hundred feet wide, leaving them at the mercy of a fearsome wind and crashing waves?

The Guardian put that question to Johnny Maddox, the commander of the Florida Keys branch of the Disabled American Veterans association. He has been offering shelter to up to 20 local people through the storm, and now is providing food and water to people who are destitute.

So why, commander? What’s it all about?

“I guess the Florida Keys is the last best refuge of people who have spent 30 years working in a factory up in Detroit or somewhere and now want to live in paradise. That’s the only reason we’re here – this is paradise.”

Paradise? Has he taken a look around him recently?

“The state of mind of people down here is: so a hurricane happens, so we get our houses back together and get right back to doing whatever we like doing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Johnny Maddox: ‘That’s the only reason we’re here – this is paradise.’ Photograph: Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

Tim Lance, 47, and Christy Clark, 45, only arrived in Marathon from Atlanta, Georgia, four months ago but they have acquired that Florida Keys mindset very quickly. They came, they said, to get married and build a new life together, and were prepared to struggle for it if they had to, spending the first six weeks living in the bushes because they couldn’t afford a place to stay.

Now Clark works in Dunkin’ Donuts and Lance in a local fish restaurant, and they are doing great. Or were, until Irma.

They invited the Guardian back to their house, a single bedroom which is now covered in a layer of slimy mud. Like the rest of Marathon, the room reeks with the sour smell of the sea, like the odour of an unkempt fishmonger’s.

So why didn’t they quit the Keys when they were well aware of the dangers and everyone from the governor of Florida down was screaming at them to get out? The answer they give is part faith, part finance.

Play Video 3:38 ‘We’ll figure it out’: faith amid the flood in Florida after Irma - video

For Tim it was God. “I believe in Jesus. I know he has brought us this far even if we have to struggle to be together. He kept us safe.”

For Christy, her faith was part of it. But she said that she wouldn’t have stayed if she could have left. She just couldn’t afford to do so.

“I was scared to death. When the wind came up it was like a train rattling right through us, shaking the whole building. I thought we were going to be sucked out of the windows by Irma. It scared me so much.”

But she earns $8.75 an hour from Dunkin’ Donuts, and when the storm came the management said to her they were shutting up shop and they would pay her the three weeks’ money she was owed when things cranked up again.

She was left penniless. “The reason we couldn’t leave was because we worried we wouldn’t be allowed back on the Keys, and then what would we do?”

God, poverty, the Keys mindset. It’s left the inhabitants of the Lower Keys in a state antithetical to paradise. They came here to escape other lives, which perhaps explains why the rescue workers are finding it so hard to reach them.

Like Donald, 52, who asked not to give his last name, who was cycling by the side of the road in Marathon where he has lived since April carrying his only possessions left after the storm: three rolls of toilet paper, a roll-up mattress, and a gallon of water.

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He picked the toilet paper up from the street among the debris. Police accused him of looting.

He said he didn’t leave because he didn’t want to go “to a damn shelter with thousands of other people – I’m not much of a people person”.

He has no food. “That’s all right,” he said. “I’m a bit too fat anyway and you can go for a month without food.”



Or Joaquin Rojas, 38, whose house was invaded by Irma, which ripped out the garage door and sent up to 4ft of water rushing through all the rooms.

“Start from zero” was his professional assessment as a building worker of what he’d have to do to his house. So does that make him think it’s time to quit the Keys, bearing in mind that Irma will certainly not be the last hurricane to strike this strange and unique place.

“No. I’ve lived here for 25 years. I’m Cuban, my family still lives in Cuba, and they had it – they always have it – worse.”

Do Christy and Tim plan to call it a day? “I know we could have died,” Christy said. “But that makes me five times more determined. We didn’t leave, so that makes us real – we’re from the Keys now.”