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Walking into disaster, the narco-trafficking scandal that blew up the BVI by Edward Siddens.

Read by Simon Darwin.

Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short,

arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands,

on the 21st of August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe.

Jasper, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth

II on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London.

The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain with only partial independence. And the governor effectively

acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jasper, a career civil servant,

it would be his first hands-on experience of governing and his first time in the British Virgin Islands.

Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the

Caribbean. If you're sitting in an office in London and someone says, go to Tortola, you look it up

on a screen and think, okay, I can do that, Jasbert told me.

While Jasbert, his wife and two sons, were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic.

At first, forecasters weren't unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September,

the storm transformed into something much worse.

In the afternoon of the 6th of September, Hurricane Irma made landfall into Tola, which is home to the majority of the BVI's

30,000 strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic

basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin.

...