Bahamian town grapples with vast destruction from Hurricane Dorian
TREASURE CAY, Bahamas — Since Hurricane Dorian plowed through Stafford Symonette’s house, and with it much of his community of Treasure Cay, he has stopped by from time to time to visit the ruins of his home.
What he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do, he said, is sift through the debris for his belongings.
“I am not ready,” he said softly, as he sat down on the toppled trunk of a palm tree.
Much like residents in other communities across the northern Bahamas, Symonette and his neighbors in Treasure Cay, on Great Abaco Island, were only just starting on Thursday to come to terms with the scale of their loss and to make sense of it all.
Evidence of that destruction was everywhere: The wasteland where a Haitian community once stood. A 45-foot shipping container mangled like a piece of aluminum foil. A Baptist church made of concrete blocks that now stood roofless, open to the heavens.
Some 95 percent of Treasure Cay’s homes were damaged or destroyed. The storm knocked out its utilities, leaving the community without power, water or communication. One resident was killed and others were injured, some seriously enough to need emergency evacuation.
“It’s gonna be a long haul,” said Steve Pedican, 58, a longtime resident.
Since Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas on Sunday night as a Category 5 storm, at least 30 people have died and thousands have been left homeless. Officials fear the death toll could rise substantially once they have better knowledge of the extent of the damage on the ground.
Treasure Cay seemed to be facing the disaster with a resignation that some residents attributed to two things: a deep religiousness among the Bahamian population, and a long-standing familiarity with hurricanes.
The community is in some ways typical of many others in the Bahamas: an amalgam of native-born Bahamians, mostly absentee foreign homeowners, tourists and migrants from elsewhere in the Caribbean, mainly Haitians.
The settlement, laid out on a peninsula scalloped with beautiful white-sand beaches, was created in the mid-20th century as a resort for foreigners, mainly Americans, residents said.
More recently, Bahamians have bought into the resort. Others live on its outskirts.
Treasure Cay’s population ranges between several hundred and several thousand, depending on who is counting and who is being counted.
Stephanie Hield, 63, the chairwoman of the local governing council, said about 450 Bahamian residents were there. But the full population can swell to multiples of that during peak vacation season. And if Haitian immigrants, many of them without documentation, are included, the count leaps further.
Since the storm, residents have been doing a nerve-wracking accounting, surveying surrounding settlements for their relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Without working phone lines, people have had to revert to word-of-mouth to pass on what little is known. On Wednesday, while waiting for the arrival of emergency supplies at a small landing strip near Treasure Cay, Hield, and Bridgette Chase, 50, a customs officer, compared notes.
“Everybody’s accounted for in Man-O-War,” Chase said, referring to a nearby cay.
“Everybody’s accounted for in Grand Cay,” Hield added. “Everybody accounted for on Turtle Cay.”
Although Coast Guard helicopters evacuated some injured residents earlier this week, the first planes carrying medical teams, volunteers and emergency supplies like water, food and chain saws began arriving at the settlement’s landing strip Wednesday.
Scores of Haitians had flocked to the airport after hearing a rumor that there were going to be evacuations.
“We were told to come to the airport to evacuate so we could find a better place to stay,” said Kalisa Lubin, 21. But most were unable to get out.
Symonette, an evangelical pastor, was also at the landing strip. He had arrived at 7 a.m., driven more by faith than solid information, to wait for a plane he hoped would be sent by an American evangelical group. He sat on an upturned paint bucket, in the lee of a building that had once been the airport’s fire station.
The hurricane had stripped the fire station of its roof and turned its contents into a jumble of furniture, construction material and office equipment. Trees surrounding the airport, like forests across the island, were mostly stripped of their leaves and leaning hard toward the West, raked over by the wind.
Private jets arrived throughout the day, disgorging supplies and volunteers, but not the one Symonette was waiting for.
As dusk approached, he offered to drive a reporter around the settlement. Since the storm, he had not ventured into town, staying mostly at the home of friends where he and his family sought shelter after the hurricane.
At Symonette’s home, he described how he and his family had tried to weather the storm. As the house was pulled apart, he recalled, they fled to an SUV parked outside. But then the house’s roof fell on the SUV so they shifted to a bigger SUV, where they spent the next few hours.
“It’s a miracle we’re even talking,” he said.
Symonette, who was raised in Nassau and moved to Treasure Cay about 50 years ago, drove through the community slowly, mostly in silence, occasionally pointing out landmarks.
“That was the primary school,” Symonette said. “This was a restaurant here. That was one under construction there.” The landscape had been rearranged to such a degree, with one heap of debris indistinguishable from the next, that Symonette at times got disoriented, mistaking one cluster of homes for another.
“Wow,” Symonette muttered.
A group of men sat by the roadside near the wreckage of a Haitian community called Sand Banks.
“Pastor, how you doing?” one called out.
“I’m all right,” Symonette replied.
“Thank God for life,” the man said.
“Thank God for life.”
Symonette had one more thing to check out: The evangelical church where he was once the pastor. He had overseen its construction, which took seven years.
When it came into view, Symonette was visibly relieved. It was a tall, sturdy-looking building, and except for some pieces of roofing that had been sheared off, it seemed to have survived the storm well.
Even the 20-foot-high cross that soared upward from the top of the facade remained in place, a fact that Symonette noted with satisfaction.
