First Eyewitness Account; Hurricane Dean on Little Cayman

This first hand account from Little Cayman by Betty Bua Smith, Manager of the Little Cayman office of Tranquil Realty. Betty, her husband Joffer and a stalwart group of Little Caymanians decided to ride out Dean at home despite the Governor's edict to evacuate. Here's her eyewitness story:

Hi Everyone,

Yes, we are all okay! But quite an experience … I apologize to all who emailed and could not return your phone calls but had no email access and once I left the office Thursday I did not return until now. My story below will tell you why!
As hurricane Dean developed we were watching closely and knew that it was going to be a big hurricane. The local people have lived all their lives here dealing with them and seem to have pretty good instincts from stories passed down. Brigitte, Joffer, and I decided we wanted to stay. Many locals also wanted to stay. We evaluated things and felt that we survived well through Ivan and this certainly wasn't going to be anything as bad as Ivan. We felt it would go south from the beginning.
While buying a few things at the store we found out a directive was given by the Governor of the Islands that Little Cayman was under "Mandatory Evacuation". So many people panicked as they were told they had to leave and the flights were shuttling people to Brac. We were called and told we had to go but we said we would sign the waiver to stay. That was Friday evening.
We were told that the power plant people had to leave and that they had to turn off the power. At 8:30 am on Saturday without notice the power was shut off. Of course, with no power we then had no way to monitor the storm. Some of our friends started dropping by that stayed and then it became party time as they all kept saying, "No Storm Coming! Going South"!
The wind was picking up a lot more and we had a few passing rain squalls. Then about 2 am on Sunday morning the wind was howling and lots of heavy rain for about an hour.
We were up early on Sunday and Joffer left with his movie camera on a walk-about at just past 6 in the morning. A fun movie with the tarpon swimming across the road and all the water, wind, and rain, during the peak of hurricane Dean. Then we drove about noon to check what we could as we couldn't go past after Rock House (fine but yard as most a mess) almost to Tarpon Lake but many rocks in the road.
Many people lost their docks but Johnny Johnson's appeared good. This was all early and seas were still pounding. The launching ramp in the village has a maybe 6' gully from the cement to the asphalt. We could see no property damage other than lots of yard work and docks other than a few people with some screens out.
Anyway, 6:30 yesterday (Tuesday) morning things were really getting bad without electricity. 2 freezers, 2 refrigerators packed! By 8:45 we now had power again! So, now to the cleaning out of refrigerators, freezers and the well holding tank. After a wonderful shower, and very late lunch I was too tired to come and set up the office yesterday afternoon and email you all. But here I am back on line!

Thanks again everyone for your emails, calls and prayers!

Hugs to you all!

Betty & Joffer