SALEM, Mass. – In the onslaught of Hurricane Irma, Stephanie Moffat pushed two mattresses up against the closet door as a woman and her 3-year-old daughter huddled inside.

Moffat felt her St. Thomas apartment shudder as 185 mph winds slammed the hurricane prevention panels against the sliding glass doors before eventually ripping them straight off. It was pitch black, except for the beam of a flashlight.

“All of a sudden I heard, ‘Stephanie, it’s flooding in here, come get us!’ I pulled off the mattresses and there was 6 or 7 inches of water (in the closet),” Moffat said, “It came so quickly into the bedroom so we all spent the night in the hall while the storm raged.”

As her apartment began to flood, Moffat grabbed clothes, towels, blankets — anything she could find — to absorb the water pouring in.

“When the flood came I wasn’t even thinking, you just react,” she said. “It was a really dumb move. You don’t have a washer and dryer —nothing to clean clothes afterwards. That was a nightmare.”

A few days before Irma hit, Moffat invited a former employee, Senedera Cowam, and her daughter, Lexi, to ride out the storm in her apartment. The cement building was built in the 1800s and acted as a lookout over the harbor for the Danish Army.

“She actually showed up two hours after I called her with her child because she was so nervous,” Moffat recalled. “It turned out to be good that she did because her wooden apartment complex collapsed and she and her child would have been in there.”

Moffat worked for the Social Security Administration for more than 37 years, spending many of those years in the Salem office, before her promotion to manager in the St. Thomas branch in 2016. She lived in Salem from 2008 to 2012 before moving to and later retiring in the tiny Caribbean island, which is one of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“It was just so sad,” she said of the wreckage. “Everything was so green and lush. The next morning after the storm stopped we went outside and it was all sticks. It was nothing. There were no palms left on the trees, all the poles were down, wires were down — there was debris everywhere.”

Once the storm ended, Moffat, a diabetic, was left without ice to keep her insulin cold for 10 days.

When people in the apartment building heard that ice was being given out, a girl went to the station and waited in line for an hour and a half for Moffat, only to realize they had run out and were giving out numbers for the next day.

Most of the island was without electricity, running water and cell phone service. The hospital and the airport weren’t operational because of the severe damage.

Her neighbors banded together to try to piece back some semblance of their homes and share resources.

“We weren’t thinking about it,” Moffat said of the dire situation. “We were just functioning. We were doing what we needed to do to survive.”

There was nowhere to shower or go for a swim. The cool blue pool they once swam in on hot days turned black and was used to flush the toilets.

“Every night we cooked together. We went through the stuff in our fridge and whatever thawed, we cooked it. One guy managed to get a case of mahi-mahi — that was a great night,” she said. Eventually the grill ran out of propane so they put charcoal in it to cook.

Friends and coworkers back in the States were doing everything they could to bring Moffat home. They reached out to Congressman Seth Moulton’s office who notified the U.S. Department of State that Moffat needed to get off the island.

Moffat had trouble getting in touch since there was no Wi-Fi, no power and no cell service. She occasionally received spotty data service to send and receive texts.

While out to get gas, Moffat received six texts at once from a friend about a Royal Caribbean mercy cruise ship that was coming into the harbor, so she drove there.

“The lack of info was horrendous. Nobody knew anything,” she said. Moffat went to four different gate attendants who kept directing her to another before finally going back to the first. “I got myself on that ship by being persistent,” she said.

With no clothes or medical equipment packed, Moffat had less than two hours to complete the half-hour drive back to her apartment, pack her things and get on the ship.

“I grabbed my mother’s wallet — she passed in 2003 — I grabbed a couple of things for my son and daughter and pretty much that was it. I had one outfit, my medical suitcase and IDs,” she said.

Moffat boarded the free mercy cruise, was seen by their medical staff and assigned a room. She departed the ship in San Juan where she caught a connecting flight to Orlando and, finally, to Logan Airport in Boston.

Since returning home, Moffat has been couch surfing. All of her belongings are still on the island. Moffat said she will stay in Salem permanently now, but plans to still spend her winters in St. Thomas. She is now working to help friends who are still there get to the States.

According to Moffat, many people staying on the island felt neglected as the media focused on the storm’s path ahead to Florida and not the damage it left behind.

“People need to remember that the Virgin Islands are a U.S. territory,” she said, “The news had forgotten us, everybody forgot us. It was very painful.”

Moffat has obtained a new outlook on life through this experience.

“My takeaway is that you just never know what’s going to be around the next corner,” she said. “Savor life and be kind, just be nice.”

Markos writes for the Salem, Massachusetts News.