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When the Barbados National Archives, home to one of the world’s most significant collections of documents from the transatlantic slave trade, reported in June that it had been struck by lightning, it received widespread sympathy and offers of support locally and internationally.
A section of the 60-year-old building, Block D, located on the grounds of the “Lazaretto” (the island’s former colony for people with leprosy), caught fire, and sustained serious damage. Official documents including hospital and school records were lost. “It was not just paper that was in the building, but documents that have stories about our families and ancestors,” says the chief archivist, Ingrid Thompson.
Although the slave trade archives were unharmed, the incident has intensified concerns about rising lightning activity in the region – exacerbated by the climate crisis – and its impact on infrastructure and cultural heritage.
Lightning has become a significant concern as the climate warms, according to Arlene Laing, coordinating director of the Caribbean Meteorological Organization. Research suggests global heating could increase lightning strikes by about 10% for each degree of temperature increase.
Studies have shown that extreme weather events in general are increasing. Warmer air holds more moisture, creating zones of instability that can trigger more powerful rainfall, thunderstorms and flash floods, particularly in urban areas with already strained drainage systems – an increasingly recurrent phenomenon.
Scientists are concerned that storm frequency and distribution may also change with shifting weather patterns. Regions accustomed to certain storm seasons may face expanded periods of instability, heightening the risk of thunderstorms and flooding.
More frequent electrical storms can lead to fires, explosions, infrastructure damage and power outages – all carrying economic and environmental costs.
The Caribbean has experienced an increase in damaging lightning strikes over the past two decades, says Laing, who oversees the Severe Weather Forecasting Programme in the Caribbean in partnership with Météo-France in Martinique. “Particularly in countries such as Jamaica and Belize, lightning has always been an issue,” Laing says.
Research indicates that approximately 78% of worldwide lightning strikes occur within the latitude range of 30ºS to 30ºN, a region encompassing the Caribbean.
Maracaibo, in the Venezuelan Caribbean, is considered the lightning capital of the world due to its combination of moisture, temperature, and topography. Trinidad and Tobago has faced numerous blackouts in recent years when lightning has hit power stations, affecting areas including the prime minister’s office. In 2020, a lightning strike decapitated a statue at the Our Lady of Fatima Church and Marian Shrine in Trinidad.
At least 16 people died in Jamaica as a result of lightning strikes between 2005 and 2021, and in September 2017 lightning hit critical radar and communication systems at Kingston’s air traffic control, closing the country’s airspace for several days. More recently, in August 2022, a fire ignited by lightning at an oil storage facility in Matanzas, Cuba, triggered multiple explosions that killed at least one person and injured 125 others.
The recent destruction of documents in Block D is not the first lightning incident experienced in Barbados. In June 2021, the country faced a freak storm called a mesoscale convective system that brought 8,000 flashes of lightning in less than 30 minutes. Experts told the Guardian that they estimated the country had experienced more lightning in the four hours that the system lasted than in the previous four years.
“Barbados and places in the eastern Caribbean were not accustomed to lightning,” Laing says. “That episode was a wake-up call to Barbados, which normally would not think about that. They need to start paying attention.”
Andrea Richards, a public archaeologist and heritage consultant, has worked with Unesco to adapt heritage management plans to the climate crisis. “We must understand how to incorporate disaster risk management and climate adaptation into our planning,” she says, referencing pilot projects at Unesco world heritage sites in the Caribbean.
She says Unesco and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) presented an action plan to culture ministers in 2022 after the severe hurricanes of 2017, including Irma and Maria, which caused extensive damage to cultural sites in Dominica and Barbuda.
Among the proposed measures is establishing warehouses and haven centres, which would also serve as knowledge hubs for cultural and heritage workers during climate-related emergencies.
This initiative is central to the Caribbean Heritage Emergency Network (Chen), a group of professionals dedicated to safeguarding the region’s cultural heritage formed in response to the destructive 2017 hurricane season. Chen has since partnered with the NGO Cultural Emergency Response to mobilise resources during crises.
Some of the records in Block D had already been moved before the fire to a new haven centre under development, says Thompson. The centre includes a facility where the island’s original slave trade documents are being converted to digital format.
This initiative is part of the “Reclaiming Our Atlantic Destiny”, or Road, digitisation project, to which the Barbados government committed after it became a republic. Road is part of the larger SlaveVoyages, an online archive gathering records on the transatlantic and intra-American slave trades led by a consortium of US universities.
The digitisation of all archival documents in Barbados has been scaled up and accelerated since the fire, say government officials. But limited resources hinder preventive efforts across much of the Caribbean.
“Even though we know that a hurricane is coming and that we should probably move some vulnerable collections to a more secure area, the resources to enable it do not exist,” Richards says. “The Caribbean is an area we must work on.”
