Hurricane Irma Traumatizes St. Martin

“I was trying to pull her out, but I couldn’t get her,” he said. “The sea took everything.”

Irma’s unprecedented force has traumatized residents across the island and convinced many that the death toll will rise sharply in the days to come. The official death toll stood at 13, but many residents know someone who disappeared or died in the storm. Radio stations have been broadcasting lists of missing people throughout the day.

Bernard Chance, an electrician and onetime local politician, said he knows at least three people who tried to ride out the storm on houseboats and then disappeared or drowned.

“It may seem foolish to stay on the boat, but when that’s your only possession, you try to protect it,” Mr. Chance said.

Close calls abound. After thrashing Sarah Lellouche’s wooden house for hours, Irma suddenly went quiet. She and her 3-year-old daughter were in the eye of the storm. Ms. Lellouche used the lull to leave with her daughter to a neighbor’s house, built with concrete walls.

“I saw the door shaking, shaking, shaking, and I said, ‘No, we’re not staying here,’” Ms. Lellouche said.

Hours later when the storm passed, she walked outside to find her toilet surrounded by a pile of rubble. “We’re happy to be alive,” she said.

Armelle Flicker and her husband were planning on riding out Irma at their house on the water, but friends convinced them to stay elsewhere. They returned to the house to find that the sea had broken through her walls and swept away her family’s belongings from the past 31 years on the island.

“We didn’t even find our furniture,” she said. “No clothes, nothing.”

Now the couple is among 20 living in a house with friends on the island’s cloistered western end. Ms. Fricker insists the death toll is much higher than official estimates.

“Just between the 20 of us in the house, we know already five people who died,” she said.

Mr. Chance said that the last major hurricane to hit St. Martin—Luis in 1995—left the island complacent.

“I myself was saying, ah, we can handle whatever comes,” he said, “but this hurricane was beyond anything.”

Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com