Though you can’t feel exactly bad for a billionaire, entrepreneur Richard Branson was affected by Hurricane Irma too.
The business magnate took to Twitter over the weekend to share photos of the devastation to his private island in the Caribbean called Necker Island. However, he made it clear he wasn’t concerned about himself, but others affected by the storm.
Branson described the damage to his luxury resort as “huge”, while sharing images of fallen palm trees, exposed buildings and destroyed furniture. In a blog post published on Friday (Sept. 8), he said resorts had been “decimated.”
“The boats are piled up like matchsticks in the harbour. Huge cargo ships were thrown out of the water and into rocks. Resorts have been decimated. The houses have their roofs blown off; even some churches where people sheltered have lost roofs,” Branson wrote.
According to reports, Branson holed himself up in a wine cellar with his family and members of his team as Hurricane Irma hit Necker Island late last week. Everyone survived the storm, though most of the island’s buildings were destroyed.
Despite the damage to his own island, Branson has deployed his private yacht Necker Belle to carry supplies from Barbados to the worst-hit islands.
He’s also called on U.S. and U.K. governments to step up their support. “Governments — the UK in the British Virgin Islands, the US in the US Virgin Islands — need to do all they can to help people here who have lost their homes and in many cases will have lost their livelihoods after the storm,” Branson wrote in his blog.
Branson also added that the hurricane points to the effects of climate change. “Man-made climate change is contributing to increasingly strong hurricanes causing unprecedented damage. The whole world should be scrambling to get on top of the climate change issue before it is too late – for this generation, let alone the generations to come,” he said.
