Canadian’s death inspires rebuild
A group of Canadian volunteers helping with recovery efforts in the Bahamas say the harrowing story of a Canadian woman’s death during hurricane Dorian inspired them to help rebuild a school where she worked.
Alishia Liolli, 27, from Lasalle, Ont., died in the storm after a wall collapsed at a lodge in the Abaco Islands where she and her young family had sought refuge, pinning her underneath a bed where they had hunkered down.
The Category 5 hurricane that hit the country on Sept. 1 destroyed much of Every Child Counts, a vocational school for children and adults with special needs.
Team Rubicon Canada, a veteran-led disaster response organization, landed in Abaco in mid-september.
A few weeks into their work on the island, the team read about a local man’s efforts to save his Canadian wife, Liolli, and their two children, said Eric Goodwin, a Toronto police officer and British army veteran who uses part of his vacation to volunteer on disaster recovery.
They found the school and offered help to All Hands and Hearts, the organization doing the heavy lifting of the school’s rebuild.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done here,” Andrew Lloyd, another member of Team Rubicon Canada, said from the school’s grounds. “It was an important place for Alishia and we are doing whatever we can to help.”
The five buildings at the school, like most buildings in Marsh Harbour, became infested with black mould, he said. One is likely beyond repair.
The Canadian volunteers removed debris that had washed up on school grounds and helped repair a roof on one of the buildings. All Hands and Hearts had stripped much of the inside of the buildings to prepare for mould remediation, Lloyd said.
Goodwin landed in Abaco a few weeks after the hurricane tore through Marsh Harbour.
The Canadian team was self-sustaining; they slept rough, ate military rations and cleaned their own drinking water. They cleared roads of fallen trees and debris, “mucked out” buildings and homes, stripping them down to the studs, and repaired roofs.
“We knew the dead remained buried under the rubble,” Goodwin said. “The smell of death, the devastation to buildings and property, survivors wandering the streets shell shocked, it was something to take in.”
Jean Golden spent several days in Marsh Harbour last month. It was an emotional trip for the Ryerson University professor who for several years had been taking a group of students to Every Child Counts. Liolli was one of those students.
Golden said she walked to the shantytowns, but there was nothing left.
“They’ve all disappeared,” she said.