I'm curious what readers of this board think about this article. I have been to St John/St. Thomas numerous times and can relate to some of the points in the article, although I still love it down there. Wish I were there now.... Any thoughts??

United States
The Virgin Islands

America's underbelly
Aug 31st 2006 | ST JOHN
From The Economist print edition

A lovely place, and woefully unprepared for a terrorist attack

THE beaches are white, lush forests cover the mountains, the turquoise sea is clear to its bed and the sun shines constantly. Tourists flock there by plane and cruise ship. Yet the Virgin Islands—St Croix, St Thomas and St John, all official Insular Territories of the union—are also perhaps America's most vulnerable point. Their infrastructure is weak; the islands are isolated geographically, 1,000 miles away from mainland America and some miles away from each other, and they are unprotected. Almost all fuel, food and medicine comes in by sea. On each island, a single generating plant provides electricity; damage to it would cut off all public power and water, and there is no grid to import electricity from a neighbouring city or state.

Illegal aliens land in the Virgin Islands openly and regularly, yet they are rarely caught. One US Customs man says that the islands, and St John in particular, are “busy drop-off points for human smugglers”, and adds: “It's not a big secret that there are organisations using the Virgin Islands to get people into the United States.”

Federal officials have compiled a long list of worries. A fishing boat carrying explosives might crash into a cruise ship. A cruise ship might be subject to a biological attack. A land-based anthrax attack might be launched on crowds during Carnival. Terrorists could easily use the St Thomas/St Croix seaplanes as a weapon, because they take off and land from the harbours many times each day and there is no passenger screening. On St Thomas, these planes fly so close to the cruise ships and ferry boats (almost as close as the boobies who swoop past with their fresh-caught, wriggling fish) that a deviation from the flight path would crash the seaplane into a cruise ship or ferry in less than ten seconds.

If any of these events caused a fire at sea, the Virgin Islands would have almost no means of fighting it. Emergency services are primitive in the extreme. Police, fire, paramedic services, search and rescue, communications and roads are all inadequate. On St Thomas there is sometimes only one government ambulance on duty for the whole island of 55,000 people (not counting tourists). On St John, where there are no traffic lights and where the main occupation is watching people waiting for the ferry, there is never more than one ambulance on duty. The Emergency Operations Centre, too, is in disrepair. There is no general evacuation plan.

The police department (VIPD) is under-trained and under-equipped and law enforcement is, at best, inconsistent and sporadic. Although most officers are hardworking and honest, complacency is endemic (drinking while driving is winked at here), and the force as a whole is not trusted.

As is typical on isolated islands, almost everyone has two or more jobs. A single person may be a police officer, a National Guard member, a Red Cross shelter manager and a part-time ferry captain, all in one. When some disaster occurs, these people are likely to be suffering its effects themselves, and therefore unable to help. After Hurricane Marilyn in 1995, the VIPD lost 90% of its vehicles, and many officers and their families were reduced to sleeping in cars.

The bigger obstacles to improving security are political and social. In government, mismanagement, nepotism and cronyism are widespread. One sewer-repair contract, said a US district judge, “reeked of politics and political influence, and, quite possibly, of political corruption”. The former deputy commissioner of health was convicted of cashing more than $100,000 in duplicate pay cheques for five years. On St John some favoured souls are allowed to lease government-owned property downtown for private business for as little as 69 cents per square foot. And when one prosecutor requested the names that went with certain licence plates suspected of criminal activity, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles tipped off the suspects.

These problems are compounded by racism, poverty, stark and increasing economic disparity and poor education. During the current governor's first term, all the public schools lost their accreditation. Tourism is almost the only industry. A large unskilled labour pool finds few jobs to do. Addiction to drugs is common, and substance abuse is accepted and even routine. Bars are as ubiquitous as the smell of pate, a favourite local snack of fried dough stuffed with meat.

Shutting an open back door
Perhaps most important is the absence of a sense of community within and between government agencies and among people at large. The population of the Virgin Islands comes from all over the world, but particularly from other Caribbean islands; the different groups remain unassimilated and self-contained, with their own meeting places and their own social circles. On St John, West Indians hang out at Mooies bar, Cap's Place is almost exclusively for Dominicans, and St Lucians prefer Tony's mobile food van (which hasn't been mobile for a decade). There is very little mixing and no unifying force.

At a minimum, the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security need dramatically to increase the federal police presence in the islands, including border-patrol officers equipped with boats and helicopters. Each island also needs more money to bolster its own emergency services, to protect its water and power systems, and especially to improve the training and awareness of the police. More honest government, a more diverse economy and efforts to achieve a more united community would not go amiss either.