Sunday, October 6, 2019

Sunday Long Read: Dorian's Devastation

The destruction from Hurricane Dorian is still very much evident on the Grand Abaco island of the Bahamas, and in this Sunday postcard from the Miami New Times, the island and the nation may never recover.

Five days after Hurricane Dorian stalled over the Abacos and nearby Grand Bahama, pummeling the islands for 24 hours with its 185 mph winds, the runway of the Leonard M. Thompson International Airport had been cleared. But the buildings that ringed the landing strip had been ripped open like Christmas presents. The control tower remained upright, but the attached office building was stripped to its skeleton. Once our twin-prop six-seater touched down, I realized the airstrip was being operated by U.S. Navy personnel who were orchestrating the traffic from the tarmac via radios.
The strangest sight: Blackhawk helicopters, C-130 Hercules transport planes, and untold millions' worth of gleaming Gulfstream jets parked scant steps from hundreds of people who, having made it this far, had no idea when — or whether — they'd be able to get out.

"I don't know where I'm going to go — no idea. Maybe somewhere where I can have a job, but who knows," said Benghy Delotte, a 35-year-old carpenter who'd been waiting outside the airport for four days with scarcely any food or water. "We've had to survive on our own. Whatever we find on the ground is what we eat."

Delotte and several dozen other men were clustered outside the airport's powder-blue-trimmed main terminal. Women and children had been allowed inside, where they'd transformed the space into a musty shelter ripe with the stink of dirty diapers. The security checkpoint had all but lost its former identity: A conveyor belt that once scanned the luggage of moneyed tourists had become a triage station littered with discarded medical supplies; the cafeteria was the domain of a burgeoning swarm of flies.

In stark contrast to Delotte, my three fellow travelers and I were well equipped. We had clean clothes. Our employer, Reuters news service, had outfitted us with plenty of water, ready-to-eat meals, mountains of batteries, portable solar panels, powdered electrolytes, and fruit juice. We had cigarettes, mesh bug nets, camera equipment, functioning smartphones, and portable satellite dishes to beam back images and interviews from the aftermath.

For the next three days, it would be our discomfiting task to point our recording equipment at piles of rubble that days earlier had been houses, and to extract stories from the occupants who'd abandoned them to the hurricane, who now were reduced to convulsive sobs at the sight of what had become of their homes and their lives.

When I deplaned in the tourist-thronged capital of Nassau late the previous afternoon, September 5, the Holiday Inn Express on Bay Street across from Junkanoo Beach was already one of the de facto headquarters for personnel arriving on behalf of relief agencies and news organizations. The lobby bustled with blue-vested United Nations workers; the thumping of Dutch, Canadian, and U.S. military boots; and the chatter of Japanese, French, Italian, and Mexican journalists.

The 700 islands that compose the Bahamas archipelago dot a swath the size of Texas in the western Atlantic Ocean. (Bimini is closest to the U.S. mainland, about 70 miles southeast of Miami.) Dorian had spared all but two of the former British colony's 16 major islands: Grand Bahama, where the city of Freeport is located, was hit hard, while Great Abaco was nearly obliterated — the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) estimated 90 percent of that island's structures were destroyed. According to the WFP, 70,000 people were in need of housing and shelter on the two islands, respectively the second- and third-most-popular tourist destinations in the Bahamas. Nassau, meanwhile, remained a veritable Disneyland, with cruise ships arriving and departing regularly.

My plan was to board a charter to Great Abaco the next morning. But the promised plane didn't materialize. Nor did a helicopter service that had accepted a $5,000 wire transfer for two rides.

Marooned in Nassau, I walked to Princess Margaret Hospital, a pastel-yellow complex styled in the imposing manner of the country's onetime British colonial overlords and the only large medical facility in the Bahamas that was fully functioning after the storm. Victims had begun arriving the day before, yet the lobby was eerily calm. I found Leon Lazard, a 42-year-old contractor from Abaco who'd been airlifted in after he was injured while rescuing his mentally handicapped brother Lawrence. Lazard and about 30 others had been caught for hours in a horrifying relay race, running from one flooded house to another, fleeing each as the winds ripped off roof after roof.

"Every time we tried to go outside, the weather would show its might," Lazard said, speaking quietly while staring off into the distance. "It would pick up something and throw it at us — like it was saying, 'If you come out here, all of you are dead.
'"

Trump may be the biggest hurricane in the news right now, but he's far from the only one.  We can't forget that.

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