A Lubbock family’s Caribbean vacation was ruined by Hurricane Irma. They traveled to the Turks and Caicos for a family vacation but the trip home was nothing short of a nightmare.
They arrived on the island and enjoyed a few days until they started hearing about a developing hurricane in the Atlantic. When the hurricane became category 5, they knew they needed to get out.
“I was thinking the worse,” said Justine Kitten. “We are stuck here and we’re going to be having to face this category 5 hurricane by ourselves.”
Their original flights home were for Thursday afternoon, the same day the hurricane was projected to hit.
“We started calling American Airlines and they started saying there are no flights out,” Kitten recalled. “My stomach dropped, I was really terrified.”
And to make the ordeal even scarier, their nine-month-old, Felicity, was with them. They were unprepared for what to expect if they were forced to stay.
“We could be without power, massive flooding, we had no clue what was about to happen so that’s why we were about to freak.”
After several hours of calling airlines and waiting at airports, the entire Kitten family arrived back in Texas safely. But they said it could have been easier with some help.
“I know the government’s been really good to get people out of Miami and sending extra flights there but I wish they would have thought about the people vacationing on the Caribbean islands because we needed help too,” she said.
Kitten said she even signed up for U.S. Embassy alerts but didn’t receive any messages until it was too late.
“We didn’t get anything the entire time. At that point it was saying, ‘If you can make arrangements to leave,’ but at that point it was almost too late,” she said.
Since getting back to the states, the Kitten’s heard their hotel in the Turks and Caicos was flooded and that storm surges flooded the airport as well.
