One year ago – on Jan. 18, 2012 – Hovensa announced that it was closing its St. Croix refinery, and the world changed. Things would never be the same, not for the island, and not for the people who used to work for the company.
Hovensa was the territory’s largest private employer. Officials at the time estimated about 2,200 people worked at the refinery, either directly for the company or for contractors. The company announced it would transition the site to a petroleum storage facility employing about 100 people.
In the next week the Source will look at the impact of the closure. This story focuses on the 800 or so refinery employees and their families who found themselves "voted off the island" and are now spread across the country and around the world.
"My heart’s in St. Croix," said Elaine Canales as she looked out the window of her new home and saw a very different sight than the one she had grown accustomed to on the island. Instead of white sand beaches and palm trees, Canales saw snow.
The Canales family was one of the last to leave as Hovensa wrapped up operations in the summer of 2012. She and her husband, Raoul, have relocated to Calgary in Alberta, Canada, part of the diaspora that broke up the tight-knit Hovensa community and spread it around the world. Wherever the petroleum industry is, there’s likely to be a former resident of St. Croix.
Former Hovensa employees can now be found in Saudi Arabia, Indiana, North Dakota and all over Texas, among many, many places. Those who spoke to the Source for this story still look back fondly at their time as islanders even as they deal with all the adjustments of creating new lives.
Canales said her eight years on St. Croix will always be an important part of who she is.
"Maybe because that’s where my children grew up, and where we first made our own friends as adults," she said. "Nobody knew anybody, and we all sort of became a family."
Anna Parrotta, whose husband Carlo worked at Hovensa for 11 years, also considers St. Croix home.
"Moving (away) was a big adjustment for our family," she said. "St. Croix will always be home for our children since we moved there when they were barely 4 and 2. Everything they do and everywhere they go will be compared to St. Croix."
Both mothers said the adjustment has been most difficult for their children. Gabriella Canales would have been a senior on the island this year, Isabella Parrotta a sophomore at Country Day.
Gabriella and her younger sister, Bryanna, enrolled in a large public high school in Calgary only to find themselves lost in the crowd.
"It was a gi-normous school," Canales said. "Nobody knew who they were. They told me ‘We want our teachers to know we are. We just want them to know our names.’ They had a really hard time of it."
So much so that the Canales moved their daughters to a private school. Similar stories were told by two other families that left the island who asked that their names not be used.
Anna Parrotta said her children faced similar hurdles.
"They really miss Country Day School, and adjusting to large public schools has been very hard. Our son plays xBox live with his friends, so he still has frequent contact with (friends from the island.) He has enjoyed playing contact football with a large team, but given the choice, he would rather be on St. Croix."
For a school assignment, Isabella Parrotta wrote an essay on the day the Hovensa announcement was made, and her memories of how her life changed as she said goodbye to her island home. It appears here.
Another family facing the problem of schools made an even more difficult decision. Sylis Kariah, a native of Trinidad, moved to the territory in 1987 and worked at Hovensa for 18 years. In 2011 he was in one of the first groups of refinery employees to be laid off. After working eight months at Cruzan Rum – which he enjoyed – he found a job at Suncor Energy in Canada. Kariah said he loves his new job and the energy of the big city, but his wife and younger son stayed on the island so the boy could complete his last two years at Good Hope.
"I have traveled back a few times to see them, so I pretty much balance it. I’m able to see them often," he said.
Elaine Canales said her daughters missed the island so much that, "all they wanted for Christmas, in their words, they wanted to go home." So during the holidays the girls returned to the island for two weeks, visiting friends and the beach and their favorite places.
"They had a fantastic time," Elaine said. "I wanted to see their reaction when they came home – see how different it is. Things aren’t the same as we left … They did notice the school was very different, the vibe."
The island’s "beat was a little different," they told their mother.
She said she and her husband hoped the trip would help them "not to close that door, but to be able to wholeheartedly open a new door."
Unlike families such as the Kariahs and Parrottas, who lived on the island for years and years, Dave Roznowski came to St. Croix just in time to leave. He was hired in 2011 to run Hovensa’s communications, arriving in September 2011. Four months later he was helping announce that the refinery would close, and he left after only 11 months on island.
But just like the others, he felt like part of a family on St. Croix.
"I got to make better friends and work colleagues in 11 months than I had in years at other companies," Roznowski said. "Hovensa was really a family. We were all in it together. When you live in a small island in the middle of the Caribbean and go into troubling times, everyone rises to the occasion."
To someone from the Midwest, whose previous job was four years in Houston, Roznowski said waking up every morning on a tropical island never lost its appeal.
"My wife said almost every day, ‘I love it here. I love it here. It’s so beautiful. I can’t believe how great this is. You never heard me say that about Houston.’"
Roznowski now lives in Whiting, Ind., where he works for BP. He said he loves the challenges of his new job, but 11 months on St. Croix was "not long enough." The Hoosier State may have a lot to offer, he said, but no place has "the soul of St. Croix."
His daughter, 4 ½, had been in preschool at Country Day and is now in a private school in Indiana. The family is expecting a new child this year.
Being a former Hovensa employee is a badge of honor, a fraternity that Roznowski said he’s proud to be part of.
"I lived there. That was cool," he said. "I fell in love with St. Croix, with Crucian culture. I still wear my hook bracelet. The other day a contractor saw it and asked, ‘Did you work at Hovensa?’ It turned out he had too. It’s like being in the military. It’s part of this fraternity.”
Roznowski said, “The island was our home. Hovensa was home. Now our family has gone their separate ways."
There are social media sites for former Hovensa employees, groups on Facebook and LinkedIn where the scattered friends can keep in touch with each other and with the island. And much of what they hear about how things are going on St. Croix troubles them – the rising homicide rate, political trouble, the spiraling cost of living.
"I follow it, every now and then, on the Source," Canales said. "I don’t do it every day because it’s depressing. When I do read it, it’s like, wow, a lot of times there’s no words for it."
Kariah said he was saddened that the refinery had closed down – but not because of his loss. He was disappointed for the island’s sake. "Even if we were displaced, we could find jobs elsewhere. But a whole company shutting down, the island suffered, not just a few families, but the whole island."
Kariah suggested the island needs to find a new large employer to bring in a lot of new jobs that create wealth, but admitted he didn’t know how to go about doing that.
Roznowski expressed hope that the governor and the Senate can work with Hovensa to make the terminal operation a success, saying that "100 jobs is better than no jobs."
"They need to start asking Hovensa, ‘What can we do for you?’ as opposed to ‘What can we take from you?’"
Canales said that for her family, St. Croix might always be home, but "it’s not the place we need to be right now." They still own a house on the island, so in the back of her mind, it’s always a possibility.
At the same time, she said she’s enjoying getting to know Calgary, her new home in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
"It’s snowing outside right now. There’s tons of snow. It’s really pretty. I didn’t think anything could be as beautiful as St Croix, but this is just jaw-droppingly beautiful."
The Hovensa employees were not the only ones that had to relocate. Roznowski recalled a study that said for every job lost at the refinery, seven others in the local economy would be affected. Pay cuts and layoffs hit government workers, and many others found that there wasn’t a future for them on the island.
Two people who talked to the Source but did not want to give their names talked about the difficulty of relocating on the mainland. Both have had difficulty finding jobs and fitting into their new communities.
The Parrotta family moved back to Baltimore, where Anna grew up. She said she misses more than the beach and warm weather.
"We miss our friends the most and all the fun we had together," she said. "People in our new state are much more closed off, and few even look at you. If you say good morning or good afternoon, you get strange looks."
"Now that we’ve left the island, we remember all the great times we had with wonderful people from all kinds of backgrounds who became family," she said.
Kariah said he is looking forward, not back. A U.S. citizen, he’s grown to love Canada.
"I love it. I don’t think I’m going to move back to the U.S.” He said it’s safe and the people are friendly. "The culture is the most diverse culture I’ve ever seen."
Parrotta and Canales, however, both said they’d love to move back to the island if they could.
"I would I go back right now," Canales said. "Would I go back to live? Probably not … It’s not feasible right now. We’d run out of money in a year. But if somebody called and said they had a great job for us, I’d sure be tempted."
