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| Hurricane Damage in the Bahamas (source here) |
It has been over a week since the hurricane struck. Thousands
of residents are still missing. The BBC is reporting that as many as 70,000
people are in need of immediate shelter, food and water.
The stories are unreal. A CNN reporter on the ground
described the make-shift rescue efforts amidst the death and destruction:
There was little coordination or
organization to the rescue effort, but limitless bravery.
Many
evacuees had held onto rafters of their flooded homes for hours, whipped by the
wind and the rain. We asked where their houses were but could only make out a
few roofs and trees in the distance.
There
were hundreds of homes there, rescuers told us, we just couldn't see them. As the rescued evacuees climbed off Jet Skis
in the waist-deep water, many collapsed and had to be carried to safety.
"People
are exhausted," rescuer Rochenel Daniel told us as the driving winds
forced the rescuers to suspend their operations. "Some we had to carry,
some couldn't even make it."
As
we fled the worsening weather, a wraith of a man in a red rain jacket
approached us and whispered, "I've lost my wife."
He
said his name was Howard Armstrong, he was a crab fisherman and hours before he
had seen his wife, Lynn, slip beneath floodwaters in their home as they awaited
rescue. He was covered in bruises.
"My
poor little wife got hypothermia and she was standing on top of the cabinets
until they disintegrated," he said. "I kept with her and she just
drowned on me."
Armstrong
said he then swam to his neighbor's house. She was dead, too, he said.
The BBC reports that multiple international aid agencies
and governments (the US and UK) are aiding the rescue and relief efforts. Impacted residents from the northern islands
are being ferried to Nassau, in the south; while some are seeking refuge in the
US and other nearby countries.
The long-term prognosis for the Bahamas is mixed. As one Florida paper reported, the islands’ crucial tourism industry will be impacted
for years to come, crippling their economy and the ability to rebuild. Even so,
the country’s government is doing all it can to rebuild and assist, while
reassuring hesitant tourists that the rest of the islands (including the
critical cruise ship ports like Nassau) are “open for business.” The country needs the continued interest (and wealth) of foreign tourists to recover. The article
continues:
Ellison Thompson, deputy
director general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism and Aviation, said the
ministry is working around the clock to tell the world that top destinations
like Nassau, the Exumas, Eleuthera and Bimini are doing fine.
“In order for the reconstruction
to happen, we would need our visitors to keep coming, so taxes can be used to
aid in the reconstruction of those two islands [Abaco and Grand Bahama, where
Dorian hit],” Thompson told the Orlando Sentinel. Preliminary estimates put the
cost of the damage at $7 billion, according to Bloomberg.
An aggressive message is crucial
in the days and weeks following the storm, said Robertico Croes, an expert with
the University of Central Florida who studies tourism economics in small and
developing countries.
“The whole thing here is speed,”
Croes said. “The quicker they can convince everybody that the southern part has
not been affected and business can go on there and, as a matter of fact, it’s a
good thing for business to go there, then [the faster] the south can help the
north.”
Working in the Bahamas’ favor is
U.S. residents’ familiarity with the region, Croes said. It’s the top market in
terms of visitors to the islands, and Americans will still travel there.
It appears the secret to the Bahamas’ resiliency is going
to be geography. Dorian hit two of the 700
islands of the Bahamas. A difference of
a few dozen miles between its path and some of the population/tourist centers
was enough to keep much of those locations intact and operational.
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