A pregnant British mother and her sister who were feared dead after Hurricane Irma ravaged Barbuda are alive and well and helping to aid their fellow islanders.
Fears that Asha and Afiya Frank, aged 29 and 27 respectively, were among the fatalities grew after their mother, Claire, was unable to contact after since the Caribbean island was flattened by 185mph winds.
But the siblings have now reportedly managed to phone their relatives to let them know they are safe and are now helping with evacuation efforts.
Former beauty queen Asha Frank (left), 29, and her pregnant sister Afiya Frank (right), 27, have been found on Barbuda
Afiya who works as a beauty therapist and as an assistant manager at a hotel on the island is currently seven months pregnant and had been due to fly back to the UK next week to give birth to her first child.
Asha had last texted family back home in Suffolk and London at 10.30pm on Tuesday night, leaving Mr and Mrs Frank desperate for good news from the island, which has been cut off from the outside world.
Mrs Frank, from Suffolk, who is currently in the UK on holiday, said she could only desperately hope that her family’s new brick-built house on Barbuda had been able to withstand the full force of the hurricane.
Claire Frank said she could only desperately hope that her family’s new brick-built house had been able to withstand the hurricane
But she said she was tormented by thoughts of famous scene in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz when the heroine Dorothy and her dog Toto are sucked into the sky by a tornado.
She said: ‘I keeping thinking of the scene from the Wizard of Oz when people were blown out of their house in fiction.
‘I have heard reports online of people saying they had to hold on to the walls inside their houses to avoid being pulled out of by the pressure inside the hurricane.
‘The winds are so strong and there is such extreme low pressure that houses can implode. I just don’t think the world has seen a hurricane like this before. It is just so difficult to imagine.’
Mrs Frank said she remained hopeful that her daughters and husband would survive and would be in touch as soon as communications were restored with the island.
She said: ‘It is the same for everyone with relatives on Barbuda. There are 1,700 people on the island and nobody has been able to communicate to establish what has happened.
‘We don’t know because we haven’t heard anything and there has not been an individual head count – but I feel they are OK.’
Barbuda’s prime minister said this morning that most of the island’s buildings are no longer standing and some including two-year-old boy are confirmed dead
Mrs Frank who has lived for most of the last 25 years on Barbuda said her daughters had previous experience of a hurricane as children when the island was hit by the 140mph winds of Hurricane Luis in 1995.
Speaking from the home of her sister Ruth Bolton in Badwell Ash, Suffolk, she said her family had been building a new brick house in the island’s main village of Corrington.
She said she expected the house to have been seriously damaged by the winds.
Mrs Frank added: ‘People on Barbuda usually have strong brick houses, but this was a storm that not even those houses could withstand
‘The house was nearly complete. It was structurally finished and we just had to complete the inside.
Afiya (left) and Asha Frank (right) with their cousin Caitlin Corrigan (centre) on the beach
‘Who knows how strong it will have turned out to be? It depends on who built it. I trust the builder, but this hurricane has been so devastating.
Asha is a former beauty queen on Barbuda
‘The Barbudans build quite strong houses because they own all the land in common together.
‘The girls are very resilient. They are Barbudans. It is not as if they are on holiday and do not know what to do, but I think the experience will have been extremely traumatic for them.
‘I am hopeful they are OK, but none of us can estimate the experience of being in a hurricane like this.’
Mrs Frank said her daughters had grown up in the UK, attending school in Thurston, Suffolk, before returning to live on Barbuda several years ago.
Her oldest daughter Asha who is a former teacher was crowned Miss Antigua and Barbuda two-years-ago and currently sits on the island’s council.
Mrs Frank said: ‘It is the same for all Barbudans. There are more Barbudans in the UK, America and Canada than there are in Barbuda. People leave as there is not much infrastructure.
‘People send their children abroad for schooling, but you encourage your children to return to the island so they can give something back because otherwise it’s a bit of a brain drain.
‘I lived there for 25 years and it is just a coincidence that I am in the UK. They stay over there, but they come backwards and forwards. I am married to a Barbudan and he is there.’
Mrs Frank said she last spoke to her family on WhatsApp at around 10.30pm on Tuesday night as they were preparing to board up their home as the hurricane approached.
But then the island’s power was cut off as a precaution and she has not heard from them since. She has since been told that phone masts are down on the island, cutting off all communications.
Mrs Frank said: ‘We were discussing what they needed to do to keep safe because we knew it was going to be a massive hurricane.
‘Then the island turned the electricity off as part of the safety measures so they couldn’t tweet or communicate any more.
‘They probably wanted to save their mobile charge and be ready to communicate when the power came back on in the morning, but then the communication masts came down.
‘It is a small island and there is only one boat a week from Antigua, so if everyone wants to buy phone cards at the same time there is sometimes not enough to go round.
Asha is a former beauty queen and Miss Antigua (left) who has been working on Barbuda
‘They didn’t anticipate these amount of damage and they would have expected to come out of it the next day with just a bit of cleaning up. The eye of the storm was due to reach them at 3am yesterday.’
Mrs Frank said she was angry about the response to the disaster by Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister Gaston Browne who at first declared that his citizens had escaped serious harm in the hurricane.
She said that the people of Barbuda had been having ‘a problematic relationship with their larger twin-island of Antigua for many years.
Mrs Frank said: ‘The real story is how the prime minister went on television and said to the world, ‘Thank the lord that everyone here is safe’ while people still haven’t heard from their families Barbuda.
‘Then he went to Barbuda on a helicopter and saw 90 per cent devastation. It didn’t affect Antigua.
‘The problem is that he would like to see everyone off Barbuda so they can develop the land for tourism.
‘A mass destruction of the island could be turned into a mass evacuation with him then declaring it uninhabitable so he can build on it.
‘It’s like the people were removed from the island of Diego Garcia so it could be developed as an American base.
Afiya is due to give birth in November and was booked to fly back to the UK next week
‘What the prime minister needs to be doing is having a head count so he can say for sure that there is only one death because he doesn’t know.
‘Yet the prime minister there said there was only minimum damage when the whole world knew that would not be the case. In this kind of situation you expect a more robust leader with integrity. He is a fool.
‘Everything is down and it is symptomatic of the lack of interest in the island that we have no information. In this day and age it shouldn’t happen. The police on the island still don’t have satellite phones.’
Mrs Frank met her husband in Leicester, and they have lived on the Caribbean island for 30 years.
Their two daughters were born in the UK and moved to Barbuda when they were young, while the couple’s son was born on the island but now works in England.
Afiya is a hotel worker while Asha is a former teacher and 2015 beauty queen who was recently elected as a member of the Barbuda council.
The women’s aunt Ruth Bolton said that the sisters have not been heard from since the most powerful storm to hit the Atlantic in its history ploughed through the area.
‘After 18 hours of no news from the island we are starting to worry that they will be forgotten. My family the Franks – sister and nieces – live there alongside 1,600 other Barbudans.
A dramatic Nasa Modis image from the Terra, Aqua and Nuomi NPP satellites shows the most powerful and devastating Category 5+++ Hurricane Irma over the Caribbean Sea last night
‘It is the sister island to Antigua but very much left to its own devices. We don’t know what they need at the moment as we have had no news, but a satellite phone would be a start. If we can just help them be able to communicate with the outside world then that would be great.
‘They will surely need other help, but this is a start and any money raised will be sent to Barbuda Council to spend on restoring the infrastructure of the island.’
Hurricane Irma is continuing to tear a deadly path through the Caribbean as the scale of devastation in its wake begins to emerge.
Anna Baltimore Thompson, who was rescued with her family from Barbuda, wants it to be evacuated before another hurricane, Jose, is forecast to hit at the weekend.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘This has been horrific, terrifying, a terrible experience. Me and my family of seven, including an infant of two months, had to shelter in a closet.
‘Before the hurricane-force winds began the roof had already gone from our premises and we had to go for shelter. The fireman and police officers came to our rescue and took us to a shelter.
‘My main concern is how we are going to survive after this. Every house, every infrastructure, every utility is completely damaged and gone.
‘All my family members don’t even have a home no more. And possibility of another hurricane heading in our direction is terrifying. I think we should evacuate.’
Asha has not been heard from since the most powerful storm to hit the Atlantic in its history
The historic storm destroyed nearly all buildings on Barbuda yesterday, killing a two-year-old child as a family tried to escape – before wreaking havoc on the French territories of St Martin and St Barts, leaving at least seven dead.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the UK is ‘taking swift action to respond’ to the disaster after speaking to the chief minister of Anguilla, a British overseas territory that was among the first islands to be hit.
Britons in the region have been urged to follow evacuation orders, while states of emergency have been declared in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Florida – amid fears Miami could be struck directly by the hurricane.
A British naval ship has been deployed to help deal with the aftermath with 40 Royal Marines on board, as well as army engineers and equipment, as authorities struggle to bring aid to smaller islands.
Destruction in St John’s on the nearby island of Antigua following the passing of the hurricane
Meanwhile Sir Richard Branson was counting the cost of widespread damage at his private retreat in the British Virgin Islands after the category five hurricane pounded the archipelago.
A massive operation is underway to evacuate people away from coastal areas on Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where aid workers are moving residents into temporary shelters before the storm hits.
This morning Irma’s eye was just north of the coast of Puerto Rico, lashing the island with heavy rain and high winds and leaving more than 900,000 people without power.
There were fears that the eye could come within 35 miles of the capital San Juan, bringing gusts of up to 100mph.
People recover broken parts of the dock after the passing of Hurricane Irma in St. John’s
Irma is moving at around 16mph on a course forecast to take it toward the Bahamas and the British overseas territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands.
An alert sent by the Department of Disaster Management and Emergencies on Grand Turk urged residents near the coasts to take shelter on higher ground, warning the storm surge could raise water levels by 15 to 20 feet above the normal tide.
Some US government personnel have been ordered to leave the Bahamas before the hurricane’s arrival, expected tonight local time.
On the US mainland authorities fear the hurricane may slam into the Florida peninsula over the weekend, just days after storm Harvey devastated Texas.
A flooded street in Gustavia on the French overseas collectivity of Saint-Barthelemy today
Officials are making preparations to potentially shut down two nuclear power stations in the Sunshine State, while evacuation orders have been given in the Florida Keys.
Donald Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach could be affected by the storm, said his administration is monitoring Irma closely.
‘It looks like it could be something that could be not good, believe me not good,’ the US president said.
With sustained winds of 185mph, the category five hurricane is the most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane on record.
Ripped off trees in Gustavia, Saint-Barthelemy,after Irma sowed a trail of deadly devastation
It is only the second time anywhere in the world a storm has been recorded maintaining such windspeeds for more than 24 hours, after typhoon Haiyan in 2013, according to an expert at the University of Colorado.
Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne told the Associated Press that nearly every building on Barbuda was damaged when the hurricane passed overhead, leaving around 60 per cent of the island’s approximately 1,400 people homeless. Barbuda had been left ‘barely habitable’, he said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he expects that victims and heavy damage will be discovered on islands of Saint Martin and Saint Barthelemy, known as St Barts.
Briton Alex Woolfall hid in a concrete stairwell as the hurricane hit while he was on holiday in St Maarten, the Dutch area of the island.
Irma has reduced the islands of Barbuda and St Martin to rubble. Saint-Barthelemy is pictured
He tweeted: ‘My god this noise! It’s like standing behind a jet engine! Constant booms and bangs. At least concrete stairwell not moving.’
Anguilla’s tourist board said its major resorts had survived the storm, although many private homes had been damaged. There were no reports of any deaths.
Mr Johnson said in a statement: ‘I’ve just spoken to the Chief Minister of Anguilla to discuss the devastating impact of Hurricane Irma. My thoughts are with all those affected and the UK is taking swift action to respond.
‘We have staff and a British naval ship ready to help those in need. Brits should follow our travel advice which will be regularly updated.’
Flooded houses on Saint-Barthelemy as Hurricane Irma continues to hit the Caribbean
Before the hurricane’s arrival Sir Richard refused to his Necker Island retreat and said he would be seeking shelter in the wine cellar with his staff.
His son, Sam, later wrote on Instagram: ‘Glad to say that all humans on Necker are ok although a lot of buildings destroyed. Very concerned for our friends and everyone on the neighbouring islands and people in its path. Please don’t take this hurricane lightly if it is heading your way.’
Christian Aid is helping to orchestrate the mass evacuation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The charity’s country manager, Prospery Raymond, said: ‘People are being moved to schools and churches for safety but in some areas, especially in the north west of Haiti, these buildings will not withstand the force of the storm.’
Dozens of British families ‘abandoned’ in the path of Irma
Dozens of British families say they have been ‘abandoned’ in a hotel in the path of Hurricane Irma – despite foreign tourists being taken to safety.
Around 40 English tourists – including children – claim they have been forced to sleep in the foyer of a boarded up hotel in Cuba.
The tourists claim staff at beachside hotel Melia Cayo Guillermo have placed the hotel on lockdown and are no longer providing any food or water.
Debris outside the Mercure hotel in Marigot, on the Bay of Nettle, on the island of Saint Martin
They claim they have been left to fend for themselves despite officials taking Canadian, French and German tourists to safety two days ago.
Families claim their pleas to Thomas Cook and the Foreign Office have been ignored – despite the hotel being just a few metres above sea level.
The storm is due to hit the nation tomorrow and families claim they have no idea where to go or how to get there.
Among the abandoned tourists is accountant Gemma Doyle, 36, her husband Vincent Schofield, 45, a builder, and their son Marc, ten.
Ms Doyle’s mother Andrea Rawlinson from Southport, Merseyside, said she hasn’t been able to get through on the phone since yesterday.
Speaking from the UK, office worker Ms Rawlinson said: ‘There is absolutely no plan in place and their families – including my daughter – are at their wits’ end.
People look down on a flooded street from a roof in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic
‘Nobody is there to help the English families. I understand things are difficult but a plan was in place from the families from other countries.
‘The families from Germany, Canada and France were taken to a place of safety two days ago.
‘Someone – whether it be their government or travel companies – has intervened on their behalf. They have been taken to a place of safety.
‘Why hasn’t the same been done for the British families? Communication and signal is very patchy but the last I heard from her she was really, really upset.
‘Along with around 40 other English people, she had been staying in the foyer for two days. They are terrified they will miss the evacuation, but it hasn’t happened.
‘I believe Boris Johnson was on the news today saying they will do all they could for the English people out there.
A man photographs the waves as Hurricane Irma moves off from the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, in Nagua
‘Nobody seems to be doing anything for my family of the other English people in this resort.’
The family flew out to Cuba for the all-inclusive Thomas Cook holiday in Cayo Coco on August 26, and were due to come home this Saturday.
Ms Doyle and her family spoke to hotel staff at the start of the week and were reportedly told to stay put.
They were told by the Foreign Office to follow the advice of the hotel, it is claimed.
‘The hotel manager told her not to worry because ‘Cuba is used to hurricanes’,’ said Ms Rawlinson.
But two days ago all the other families – from Canada, France and German – were moved out. It is not clear who organised the move.
The Britons gathered in the foyer – frightened they would miss their evacuation – but nobody turned up.
A woman walks on a street as Hurricane Irma moves off from the northern coast of the Dominican Republic
The claim they phoned Thomas Cook who said a rep would arrive at the hotel yesterday, but failed to show.
Hotel staff apparently boarded up the hotel, leaving tourists to survive on crisps, bread rolls and butter, and fizzy drinks they have been able to buy.
‘They don’t know what to do and nobody has given them any advice,’ said Andrea.
‘Last night the hotel was packed up and the staff told guests they need to evacuate, but no protestations have been made. Gemma doesn’t know where to go that will avoid the storm.
‘Last time I spoke to Gemma she was talking about getting a taxi to Havana but she has no idea if that is a good idea. She only thought there might be help there as it is a big city.
‘The hotel is only a few metres above sea level – with a long ocean causeway leading to it – and it won’t stand a chance it the storm hits.
‘All the British families have no idea what to do, have been abandoned by everyone, and nobody is offering any advice.
The Hotel Mercure in Marigot, near the Bay of Nettle, on the French collectivity of Saint Martin
‘Last I heard from her the wind was picking up, the skies had changed colour, and there was lightening.’
A spokesman for Thomas Cook said evacuations had not yet taken place in the Cayo Coco resort.
She said: ‘We are looking out for our customers and doing everything we can do help them. The Cuban authorities do issue a notice of precautionary evacuation.
‘Our special assistance team has been sent out and people will be evacuated to Varadero or Havana. People will either be in their hotel room or in an alternative shelter.’
She added it was normal for Canadian tourists to be evacuated first due to their proximity to the country and it was more difficult to get British tourists home.
She said the evacuation warning hadn’t yet been issued to the Cayo Coco resort and they were shocked to hear about the mother and her 10-year-old son being stranded in the hotel lobby.
The Foreign Office has been approached for comment.