When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do they? In this series, The Times investigates to see if those promises were kept.

SAINT-MARTIN, French West Indies — In the debris that had once been furniture and a roof were the vestiges of a holiday home: a cluster of flip-flops, a romance novel, a child’s ball floating in a plunge pool’s fetid waters.

On a recent visit, it looked like an artillery barrage had smashed into this small bungalow and a dozen or so other nearby cottages in a similar state of ruin, in what had been a pleasant vacation compound on a bluff above the Atlantic Ocean.

This scene of utter destruction in the aftermath of a Category 5 hurricane was not in the Abaco Islands or on Grand Bahama, devastated by Dorian last month. This wasteland was on St. Martin, an island that took a direct hit from Hurricane Irma on Sept. 6, 2017, and where, two years later, recovery is still far from complete.