Much of Barbuda island in the Caribbean gone after being hit by Hurricane Irma

Once there was an island known as Barbuda; after Hurricane Irma, much of it is gone.

Hurricane Irma has decimated the small Caribbean island of Barbuda, ripping apart buildings, uprooting trees and killing at least one person as its 185mph winds swept across the two-island nation best known for its pristine sandy beaches.

“Barbuda is totally destroyed,” Roderick Faustin, first secretary for the embassy of Antigua and Barbuda in Washington told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. “At least 95 per cent of the properties in Barbuda are either totally destroyed or damaged.”

The schools, sole hospital and airport, and two hotels on the island of 68 square miles were either damaged or lay in ruins, Faustin said. There is no running water and telephone service is out after the communications tower was literally snapped in half.

“Hurricane Irma would have been easily the most powerful hurricane to have stormed through the Caribbean, and unfortunately Barbuda was in its path,” a grim-faced Prime Minister Gaston Browne told ABS TV in Antigua on Wednesday after flying over Barbuda. The island of 1,800 to 2,000 people was “barely habitable,” he said.

“It was heart-wrenching, absolutely devastating,” Browne later told CNN. “I have never seen any such destruction.”