No one on the Colombian island of Providencia was prepared for what happened on the night of Nov. 16, 2020. Not even Josefina Huffington, who had survived four hurricanes. That evening, as she waited for the storm to pass by playing parchisi with her son, a tree, lifted by winds as fast as 305 kilometers per hour (190 miles per hour), smashed against her window. “This is it,” she recalls telling him as she saw the roof fly away. They survived the storm, but their 1,700-hectare (4,200-acre) island, part of the San Andrés Archipelago, was turned into rubble. “The color of everything changed, everything was black, ” Huffington says. “The entire island looked as if it was set on fire.” Hurricane Iota destroyed around 2,000 homes in Providencia, which has a population of roughly 4,600. Hospitals, schools and churches were flattened by the category 4 hurricane. Nothing was left. This might not be a singular event; research has shown that climate change could bring more intense extreme weather in the region. As some scientists fear a change in hurricane behavior, communities across the more than 700 islands in the Caribbean Sea are increasingly vulnerable to their impacts. Before the hurricane, houses in Providencia differed in size and color. Now, they all look alike: blue, yellow, green, or purple walls and white roofs. Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos. After the disaster, Colombian authorities sent help to Providencia; by the end of 2022, two years after Iota, almost every house…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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