Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
WPLG reporter, photographer rode out storm in Bahamas.
WPLG reporter and photographer ride out hurricane in Bahamas
For more than 15 hours, WPLG-Ch. 10 reporter Jenise Fernandez and her photographer Brian Ely were caught in a blackout period.
With cellphone service down and WiFi gone, their colleagues and bosses at the Pembroke Parkbased television station didn’t hear from them during the tense hours they were trapped in the teeth of Hurricane Dorian.
At the time, Dorian was a Category 5 monster storm barreling over Marsh Harbour where Fernandez and Ely were the only television crew from South Florida.
As viewers watched Dorian’s eye engulf the island and the storm stall over the Bahamas for many heart wrenching and destructive hours, they tweeted their thoughts and prayers for Fernandez and Ely. Now back and safe in Miami after a harrowing reporting stint in a monumental hurricane, Fernandez is trying to put some perspective on the storm with an official death toll of 50 that is bound to rise.
“We didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was,” the Miami Lakes native said Tuesday.
WPLG, known as Local 10 to viewers, dispatched Fernandez and Ely the afternoon of Aug. 30 to be on the ground in Marsh Harbour when the hurricane was on the approach as a Category 2 storm. They began sending live reports from their hotel the Abaco Beach Resort and Boat Harbour Marina.
But as they worked that weekend, the storm intensified, powering up to a Catetory 4 with Marsh Harbour in its crosshairs.
“Every day was a new report and every day, we saw it get closer and closer,” Fernandez recalled in an interview with the Sun Sentinel. “Not only was it a Category 5, it was coming toward us. You can say right place, right time or you can say wrong place, wrong time.”
With the airport closed Saturday night, Fernandez and Ely hunkered down at the hotel where a crew from ABC’s national network was also posted.
“There was no getting off the island at that point,” she said. They delivered as many reports as possible from the rear of the resort until the winds became ferocious Sunday and the storm made landfall. They headed inside the resort’s first floor fitness room and bunker to ride out the western side of the eye.
As the eye passed, they headed outside to use their satellite phone to call WPLG and report what they were seeing.
“We saw one of the roofs of the building fly off, it was crazy,” she said. She also saw the raging storm surge “like a rushing river” and a family of four caught in its current but then rescued. The parking lot was also submerged.
Back at their South Florida station, meteorologist Bryan Norcross told Fernandez and her crew that the wind direction was changing and to seek an area that was safer and higher ground away from the storm surge.
When Fernandez and her photographer couldn’t open the doors to their rooms, another hotel guest who had a room on the second floor invited them to ride out the storm there.
She huddled in the bathroom. “Total fear took over. It was a mix of adrenaline and fear,” she said.
But then the dry wall of the bathroom ceiling began crumbling. She headed to the closet and hid there. She remembers hearing alarm and light fixtures popping and people screaming.
“You can hear the gust which was like a whistling sound,” she said. “The whole building was shaking for hours.”
The trio caught some fitful sleep as the slow-moving storm rolled over the islands.
When they could, Fernandez and her photographer surveyed the scene. Bungalows were gone. Docks underwater. Balconies blown off. Panels of wood littered the property. Shutters ripped off. Palms stripped of their fronds.
“The damage is like something I’ve never seen before,” a breathless Fernandez told WPLG on the air. “Can you let my mom and dad know I’m okay and let Brian’s wife know that he’s okay as well? We are hanging on.”
The pair eventually holed up with the three-person ABC crew who were staying in a condo in another part of the resort. The five of them shared a den, the only part of the unit that wasn’t damaged, until WPLG and ABC sent helicopters Tuesday to pick each group and fly them to Nassau where they continued reporting, Fernandez said.
And when the station knew Fernandez was okay, its digital staff shared a tweet with viewers on her behalf that she was “safe and thankful for it.” Since arriving home she’s been busy writing back to each of the viewers who emailed her and the station concerned about her safety.
“We were really committed to the story and we were really committed to let people know what was going on,” she said.