Patria-Kaye Aarons | When the mega storm comes

Pick the road with the highest speed limit in Jamaica – one of the highways. Accelerate to the speed limit of 110km – just above 68 miles per hour.

Now apply more pressure to the gas pedal. A lot more. Double the speed limit. Triple it. Quadruple it. If you drive most midsize vehicles, floor your gas pedal. That’s the force at which The Bahamas got hit by Hurricane Dorian earlier this week.

And it didn’t just clap them and leave. For more than 48 hours, that small chain of islands was ­pummelled by the strongest storm ever recorded to have made ­landfall in the Atlantic region, crawling across the archipelago at a life-claiming one mile per hour.

From 4:55 on Sunday afternoon until 3 a.m. on Monday, sustained winds of 185 miles per hour pounded the nation. Even stronger intermittent blows of up to 220 miles per hour were dealt. And then bad got worse. Dorian stopped moving forward. Stopped moving its wrath away from the Bahamas. It just sat there – and fought. Wrap your mind around your car slamming into your bedroom wall over and over and over again for all of three days.

Prime Minister Hubert Minnis described the unfair battle his country found itself inadvertently fighting for its life in. “The Bahamas is presently at war and being attacked by Hurricane Dorian and yet has no weapon at its disposal to defend itself ­during such an assault by this enemy.”

Just imagining the plight of my Caribbean neighbours has sent me into panic. The horror of living through that experience at night, the electricity out, terror heightened by pitch blackness and the sound of the vicious attack of the wrath of nature. Rising flood waters swirling, the liquid intruder climbing stairs and claiming everything in its path – from furniture, to ­vehicles, to precious memories, to people. Forcing those that remain to climb higher.

Technology has been a blessing (of sorts) this hurricane season. I’ve got live footage out of the islands as the crisis unfolded. Heartbreaking shared 911 calls appealing for a search party for lost family members. Facebook Live broadcasts from the mother of a four-year-old trapped. People frantically sending police GPS locations begging to be rescued from rooftops. Shared WhatsApp images of people stuck in the attic.

I held my breath watching as even from the highest possible point of safety, you could see the deadly tease of waves under someone’s roof rafters three stories high.

HELPLESSNESS

There’s a helplessness you feel watching the storm inch closer on your computer. I get a gut-­wrenching feeling in my stomach when a system approaches not just Jamaica, but any of my Caribbean neighbours.

As much as I no longer give regular weather reports on television, the desire for information will always reside within me. I checked my regular weather sources for updates, and it didn’t look good. The ability to trace the storm path, projection, and intensity gives you little peace. Numbers drive the danger home. When you realise that hurricane-force winds often extend wider than entire islands, looming calamity becomes more real. A mega storm like Dorian comes with 30-foot waves. All the people of Bahamas could do was pray for the best and brace for the worst.

My thoughts shift to the rebuilding efforts. How do fewer than 400,000 people rebuild a nation? How do you pick up the pieces after life as you know it has literally been washed away? Taxes alone can’t do that. Salaries can’t do that. The Bahamas needs us. All of us. It will need our time, talent, and money. Easily, this could have been us. One Caribbean.

Patria-Kaye Aarons is a confectioner and broadcaster. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and findpatria@gmail.com.