Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘WE NEED HELP, AND WE NEED LOTS OF IT’
Bahamians living in Florida feel a sense of the destruction
Hour after hour, Keith Cooper listened to the howl of Hurricane Dorian.
Cooper was holed up in a family home in Freeport, 100 miles west of where Dorian touched down Saturday in Elbow Cay, an 8-mile sliver of land jutting out northeast of the Bahamas.
He listened to the deadly winds for close to three days — three days that felt like an eternity.
“They were constantly
battering us,” he said. “It wouldn’t stop.”
Dorian discarded homes and cars like mere twigs as it ripped its way through the Abaco Island chain. Everyone who watched it play out on social media and television screens could feel the sense of unending destruction. But it was felt most, perhaps, by Bahamians spared in the islands and those who have made their homes in Florida.
Cooper was born in Nassau but spent much of his life living in West Palm Beach and working in the hospitality industry before returning to the Bahamas in 2004 to run tours that include stingray fishing and snorkeling.
He’s lived through plenty of storms, both in Florida and on the Bahamas, including Hurricane Matthew, which destroyed his home in 2016.
Dorian was different. “I don’t think anyone in this world has ever seen a storm perform the way Dorian did,” Cooper said. “It was an enigma of weather.”
Cooper said he was lucky that the home he stayed in did not collapse. He knows other parts of the Grand Bahama island and the Abaco islands did not fare so well.
Although Cooper had yet to venture outside his home by Tuesday morning since first shacking up there in the days before the storm, he said he’d heard of drowned businesses downtown, a newly built bridge destroyed, and once-paved roads whose tar had been peeled back so far that there was nothing but rock left.
“It’s going to be a real challenge to get on our feet,” Cooper said. “We need help, and we need lots of it.”
Thankfully, Cooper said, Florida, which is home to a large Bahamian-American population and sends flocks of tourists to the islands year after year, is not far away and already mobilizing to help. “Thank God we’re close to Florida,” he said.
From West Palm Beach to West Park to Coconut Grove, the Bahamian culture has a deep connection with South Florida.
Miami attorney Marlon Hill, a community activist and advocate for the region’s Caribbean diaspora, said the cultural history of Bahamians in South Florida exceeds 125 years. About 14,000 Bahamians live in South Florida, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but a Hill calls the figure conservative.
“The Bahamian community is pretty multilayered because it’s multi-generational and it’s tri-county as well,” he said. “You have different nationalities with business interests there. Fifty percent of the gross domestic product is involved in tourism and travel. That is basically our economy.”
The island nation, which gained its independence on July 10, 1973, from the United Kingdom, but which remains a member of the commonwealth, is the 23rd largest trade partner with the U.S. Customs district that covers Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.
The first islanders to settle in the area that would become Fort Lauderdale were the Lewis and Robbins families, who established a plantation on the New River in 1790, according to Patricia Zeiler, executive director of History Fort Lauderdale.
In the early 1900s, large numbers of immigrants from the islands settled in the Miami area and helped build Coral Gables. They brought with them knowledge of agricultural techniques to develop rocky terrain into farmland, and masonry skills to construct buildings out of coral rock.
Frederica Wilson has represented northeast Miami-Dade County and southern Broward County in Congress since 2011. But before she ever entered politics, the Abaco Islands have figured large in her heart.
“Its my ancestral home,” Wilson said .
Wilson said her ancestors trace back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when they were first put on a slave ship headed from Africa to either the Carolinas or the Caribbean.
According to family lore Wilson was told as a child, one of the slave ships wrecked on the Abaco Islands and a number of slaves escaped onto the largely desolate terrain. “My family was part of that first lineage,” Wilson said. “They stayed there and made a way out of no way.”
Wilson grew up visiting the islands often, which are known for their hotels, casinos, private residences and a fishing industry that produces fresh lobster and conch.
“Abaco is gorgeous,” Wilson said, then paused. “It
was gorgeous. It is devastated now.”
Wilson has a number of cousins who rode out Dorian on the islands. Luckily, they survived.
However, she fears that the intensity of the storm and the amount of people on the island who may not have been registered citizens means others won’t be so lucky. “I don’t think we’ll ever know how many people were washed away at sea,” Wilson said.
Wilson said her family back home had grim news to report about the islands she loves so much when she finally got a chance to speak to them recently.
“They said it was like a tsunami came through,” she said. “They told me I wouldn’t even recognize it anymore.”
For the last couple days, Wilson has spent her time organizing relief efforts and meeting with officials to find out when it is safe to get over to the island. The donations she’s piling up at her office are great, she said, but she is eager to touch the people back on the island.
“I need to go,” she said. “I need to see.”
Unfortunately for Wilson, and many others who have tried to organize relief efforts, traveling to affected areas remains extremely difficult.
“If you go on a ship, you need a port and if you go on a plane you need an airport,” Wilson said. Right now, she added, the islands have neither.
Kenwood Burrows, a project manager at a procurement firm, is paralyzed in just the same way.
Burrows moved from the Abaco Islands to Fort Lauderdale last November. Back on the islands, where he worked for many years, he has cousins, friends and colleagues — some of whom he has yet to hear from since the weekend.
“There’s a whole block of time and information that we don’t know anything about,” Burrows said with a trembling voice. “We still can’t account for everyone right now.”
Burrows was born and raised in the Exumas, a collection of small islands in the central Bahamas. However, he calls Abaco his second home.
While living and working there, Burrows found the people to be friendly and he said the community welcomed him as their own.
Even though the islands are small — in total less than 20,000 live there — Burrows said there was a lot to enjoy. “It was a good and thriving community,” he said. “This event has probably set them back years.”
Like many Bahamians in South Florida, Burrows said he was shocked by the images and videos he saw on screens over the last few days. As of Tuesday, words were still struggling to form in his mouth. “We’re just trying to keep composure and put relief efforts together,” he said.
Ever since Dorian began to make its exit from Florida yesterday, many in the state have had the people of the Bahamas on their minds.
Donation drives in churches, businesses and political offices are gathering pounds of valuable necessities like medicine, food, clothes and water.
Lawmakers are calling on the federal government to ease visa restrictions for Bahamians seeking refuge.
Boaters, businesses and community groups are raising thousands of dollars and planning relief operations by air and sea.
Old Bahama Bay Resort on West End, the oldest town and westernmost settlement on Grand Bahama, is one of the many businesses taking things into their own hands.
The luxury resort complete with a 72-slip marina for yachts, is roughly 50 miles away from West Palm Beach. Many of its visitors come over on their boats from Broward, Palm Beach and Stuart counties.
Over the coming weeks and months, the resort intends to serve as a command center for all donated supplies it is collecting from 10 marinas up and down Florida’s coast. It’s an operation that is familiar to John MacDonald, president of the resort.
According to MacDonald, the resort was responsible for bringing in over 175,000 pounds of supplies to Grand Bahama after Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
Sergio Nativi, executive director of the resort, said the resort and its visitors are a community with a deep affinity for the Bahamian people. “I have people that are like family over there who are very distraught and in a bad place,” he said.
Though many of these efforts have remained stalled because of the sheer destruction to the infrastructure of the Bahamas, Cooper remains about as optimistic as he can be.
“We are very grateful to be alive,” he said. “We endured something we could not have ever imagined in our lives.”
When he finally emerged from the hurricane and was able to talk on the phone again, Cooper said he received messages from former tourists and friends from countries all across the world wondering how they could help the Bahamas recover.
Cooper added that in the past, GoFundMe’s and individual relief operations have proved useful to get to help to people who might be missed by larger relief organizations or the government, which is often tied up with logistics. “The government can only do so much,” he said. “We have to help one another; we have to really be our brother’s keeper.”
Right now, Cooper acknowledged, much of the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama effectively remain a “ground zero” zone.
But he is confident that with support from Florida, the United States and other countries who think of the Bahamas as a home away from home on vacations and holidays, the country will bounce back.
“The billions we are going to need to recover is just incredible,” Cooper said. “But we are going rise up.”