‘Everything is destroyed. It is horrifying’
Hundreds remain missing after hurricane devastates Bahamas as survivors try to make sense of destruction
‘As the waters came through, my husband, my son and I all sat on top of the counter and we sang all night, every hymn we could remember’
By Hayley Dixon in Grand Bahama PASTOR Joey Saunders was at home with his son Jeremi, 25, when the wall of water swept the roof off of his 32ft home and took him with it.
“Somehow I got hold of a pine tree and I just held on,” he told The Sunday
Telegraph. “I clung on to that tree for two days. It was raining and I had salt water in my eyes and I couldn’t see very well, but I felt at peace.”
After two days of clinging on, unable to eat or sleep, the rains stopped and he called out for his son. From a tree just a few yards away his son called back. Each had thought the other was dead.
Others weren’t so lucky. So far 43 have been declared dead since Hurricane Dorian swept through but hundreds and perhaps thousands remain missing in the archipelago nation of about 400,000 people.
Mr Saunders’s tale of survival is just one of the thousands among residents who have weathered the worst hurricane to hit the Bahamas.
But the terror as waves 15ft high surged into their homes and they were battered by 220mph winds is just the beginning as people wonder how to start their lives again from scratch.
As the floodwaters subside and roads begin to be cleared it is estimated that almost half of the homes on the two islands which were hit by the hurricane have been destroyed and 70,000 people are in need of life-saving aid.
On Great Abaco Island, rescue workers have been sifting through the rubble in an operation that is expected to dramatically increase the death toll from the official number of 30.
In Freeport, the capital of Grand Bahama, people queued around the block for food and water while the queue to get to the port, in the hope of reaching safety, stretched more than a mile long.
Pastor Pedyson Baillou had escaped to Freeport on Saturday but only because his father is in poor health and needed to be close to the hospital.
As he drove east to visit the rubble that he once called home, Dorian’s trail of destruction got worse. As he passed friends and neighbours on the Grand Bahama Highway, he beeped his horn and called out: “You all right?” Each time the shout came back the same: “We are alive.”
In two days of devastation, roads had been torn up and trees snapped like twigs. Electricity pylons were strewn across the road, boats littered among trees and fish swam in muddy puddles a mile inland.
The road to High Rock only became passable on Thursday, five days after the category five storm began.
Pastor Baillou said that the residents had cleared it with their own hands, wading through flood waters that had left their high-tide mark 10ft up the remaining trees.
He visited his brother, Eric, 64, who had barricaded himself and his daughter Tiffany into the bathroom for two days as their home was battered. With the roof collapsed into the bedroom, Tiffany, 39, is still sleeping in the bath.
The pastor’s son Pedro, 37, was also at the roofless home of his uncle. He had survived by hanging on to a mango tree for two days as the waters surged.
Further up the road Pastor Baillou surveyed the wreckage of his home of more than 30 years. A mobile phone and a sewing machine lay among piles of debris. “This is it,” he shrugged. “This is my home. Thank God I left or I wouldn’t be alive right now.”
Some of his neighbours could not say the same. The body of Marvin, a handyman in his 40s, is the only one to have been found in High Rock, but many others are feared dead.
Further east, the roads have yet to be cleared. Some had walked to check on residents, but had yet to return.
Iona Kamp was picking up the pieces of her life that had been swept away, recalling how she clung on for dear life.
“I sat on top of the microwave as the waters came through my house but I was not afraid,” she said.
“I was not afraid because we sang. My husband, my son and I all sat on top of the counter and we sang all night, every hymn we could remember.”
Sherline Cooper, Mrs Kamp’s neighbour and closest friend, is among those counted as missing.
She was in her home with her sister and her sister’s family including her son and her grandchildren, one boy aged six and three-year-old twins.
The home has been completely flattened and the seven family members are nowhere to be seen, feared dead.
“Everything is destroyed, it is horrifying,” said Mrs Kamp. “After I found out about Sherline, I just broke down and cried.”
The locals know that they face an arduous task to find the bodies, to repair their homes and the infrastructure.
But first they need water, food, and electricity and they need shelter.
They are still waiting for any of these things to reach the east of Grand Bahama.
Sherell Kemp, 45, was returning to her home across an impassable road and she had one message. “I want the world to know that we need help,” she said.