‘Like I was watching death in the eye’: A farmer loses all
Alpha Celestin survived Category 5 Hurricane Dorian by crawlimg into his ceiling space, but his Freeport-area banana farm was devastated.
FREEPORT, BAHAMAS
Hurricane Dorian’s floodwaters surpassed the floor boards, already five feet off the ground, so banana-farm owner Alpha Celestin, 61, busted a hole in his ceiling, propped a ladder there, and climbed inside with two of his workers.
He knew the other men
couldn’t swim, so when he spotted the water creeping up to 15 feet inside his home, he tied Styrofoam from his ceiling around their chests to keep them afloat. They stayed perched there for 48 hours.
“This is the first time
I’ve ever come so close to death, like I was watching death in the eye,” he said. “I never knew of such a hurricane.”
Celestin and his two employees crawled down on Tuesday and walked two miles through chesthigh water to high ground. There, they hitch-hiked to town and called family.
“Everyone expected to pull a dead body from that house,” he said. “When I called they were very happy.”
When Celestin returned to his farm off Grand Bahama Highway near the airport on Thursday, he found all of his plants were ruined. His home was still intact, but it was so wet it was as if the walls and everything inside needed to be wrung dry.
As the government still searches for the missing on the neighboring Abaco Islands, farmers such as Celestin on Grand Bahama are on their own for now, wrestling with how to start picking up the pieces.
Celestin doesn’t know where to start. A native of St. Lucia, he grew up farming bananas with his family there. He bought his farm outside Freeport 10 years ago, and it hasn’t been