With its seaside villas, luxury resorts and yachting anchorages, Virgin Gorda is known for laidback luxury.
But last August, the island’s residents started complaining about the foetid odour of their tap water.
“When you take a shower, you come out smelling like sulphur dioxide — like bad eggs,” construction contractor Christina Yates said at the time.
The problem was widespread across The Valley, which is home to most of the island’s approximately 4,000 residents. Some said the water burned or gave them a rash when they showered. Others said it killed their house plants when they watered them. And soon, many residents had no tap water at all for hours or days at a time.
As the complaints grew louder, the government offered an explanation that many residents had suspected: Sargassum had entered the intake pipe at the desalination plant that produces most of the island’s public water. This problem had exacerbated longstanding issues with the water distribution system, leading to rationing that cut the supply nearly in half.
The water crisis was not the first. In the Virgin Islands and other Caribbean islands in recent years, sargassum has periodically damaged water and electricity plants and left residents without basic services.
Last May in the Dominican Republic, for instance, sargassum knocked out a generation unit at the Punta Catalina Electric Generation Company, which produces about 30 percent of the country’s electricity, despite a $4 million investment in filters a year earlier.
A team removes sargassum at the facilities of the Punta Catalina Thermoelectric Power Plant in the Dominican Republic in 2023. (Photo: PUNTA CATALINA THERMOELECTRIC POWER PLANT)
In 2022, sargassum affected a desalination plant on St. Croix so badly that the governor declared a state of emergency.
And in September 2021 in Puerto Rico, hundreds took to the streets to protest widespread, days-long power outages that the government blamed on the seaweed.
But despite this history, the VI government had done little to prepare, even though its own draft sargassum management strategy warned since April 2023 of the risks at the Virgin Gorda plant and recommended measures that could have prevented the water crisis.
Following complaints in the summer, the government announced on Sept. 1 that it had “resolved” Virgin Gorda’s water issues by flushing water lines, conducting tests, and taking other steps.
Online petition
But residents said otherwise. On Sept. 20, they launched an online petition calling on government leaders to meet with them and explain the way forward.
Sargassum, dirt and other debris were still piled on the shore in front of the desalination plant in Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, last November, more than two months after the seaweed damaged the facility. (Photo: FREEMAN ROGERS THE BVI BEACON)
“Especially at night when you’re sleeping, it’s like somebody’s putting their finger in your nose when you’re trying to sleep to stifle you,” he said. “It’s like it’s blocking out your nostrils. Even if you close the windows tight.”
The ‘every-year surprise’
During the October meeting on Virgin Gorda, officials explained various plans for protecting the water plant in the future.
For instance, Mr. Matthew said, they had consulted with a dive company, which suggested reorienting the plant’s intake grill so the seaweed can’t fall directly into it.
“They also suggested extending [the 850-foot intake pipe] by 800 feet, which is very expensive,” he said. “That structure has been there for almost 30 years — 1994 we installed that. So adding 800 feet to it would put us outside of the normal zone that will be affected by the sargassum.”
That step, he said, would require funding from the government.
But it is unclear where the money would be sourced for such work. The government’s 2024 budget includes no specific line item for managing sargassum. And even the team that drafted the 2023 sargassum strategy noted that they were unable to obtain from the government the details of related allocations in the past.
Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley, who represents Virgin Gorda in the House of Assembly, lives in a house that overlooks Handsome Bay.
In an interview for this investigation, he described longstanding struggles to find funding for a sargassum response in a territory that has been battered by other climate change impacts, including catastrophic damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017.
“I had put in $50,000 for the removal of the sargassum [in the budget in 2019], but it only lasted for like one year,” he said. “I don’t think the [financial secretary] or whoever saw it as something that needs to be in a budget all the time. That’s why I nicknamed sargassum the ‘every-year surprise.’ We never plan for it, as if it’s not going to come.”
And because of the territory’s status as an overseas territory, he said, accessing climate financing from abroad is usually not an option.
“We have no access to global funds: Resilience fund, the loss-and-damage fund,” he said. “What we are attempting to do is to find some avenue to get access to some funding.”
Long before the water plant was damaged last year, he added, he requested that the sargassum be removed early in the season. But the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Climate Change — which he no longer oversees and which didn’t respond to requests for comment — didn’t react quickly enough, he said.
By April 8, 2024, sargassum was once again washing ashore near the desalination plant at Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, but a promised protective boom had not been installed. (Photo: PROVIDED)
In January, however, Premier Dr. Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley described sargassum management as one of his government’s priorities, and said that a boom would soon be installed in Handsome Bay to keep the seaweed away from the shoreline.
But by mid-March, residents had seen no sign of the boom, and attempts to obtain more information about that project and other planned measures in the area were not successful.
Meanwhile, sargassum has begun to wash ashore in Handsome Bay once again.
Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), and Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) contributed to this investigation. This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
