Hurricane Horror - Stench, sight of dead bodies linger in mind of first-time mom
Published:Tuesday | September 10, 2019 | 12:00 AM
Damion Mitchell, Integration Editor
Twenty-nine-year-old dental student Brittney Dorsett wrestles by the seconds with painful flashbacks of four days of hurricane horror on the island of Abaco in northeastern Bahamas.
For half of those days, she clung to her one-year-old son as they, along with three other family members, huddled under two mattresses in a hot, dark closet of her aunt’s apartment, seeking refuge from a fierce fight with nature packing winds of 145 miles per hour and pushing punishing surges across the tiny Caribbean island.
The powerful Hurricane Dorian was merciless to The Bahamas.
“It was devastating,” Dorsett recalled.
She was just about to take a shower on Friday at the home of relatives in Nassau, when The Sunday Gleaner caught up with her by telephone.
The calm was the total opposite of the chaos and misery at her aunt’s apartment during the height of the storm in Royal Harbour on Abaco Island last week.
“Once the hurricane touched down, all the windows blew out, the doors blew out and the water was coming in,” she recounted, finding the only safe place inside the closet.
The experience was a complete shock to the family, who had left their Royal Harbour beachfront house just before the storm to the stay at the hillside apartment they thought would be safer.
HE WAS SO AFRAID
According to Dorsett, her stepfather decided to ride out the storm at their Royal Harbour house to protect the property, but minutes after the category five Dorian began to bear down, he had to abandon the house and seek refuge elsewhere.
The first-time mother said as the hurricane pounded the apartment, the infant grew even more terrified.
“He was so afraid, he was so afraid,” she said, adding that the heat in the closet only made it worse.
Minutes turned into hours of terror, but a short break would come during the passage of the eye of the storm when loud shouts came from outside enquiring if anyone needed help to be evacuated.
Dorsett said she and relatives grabbed a few relief items and headed to the nearby hospital, where her aunt worked as a nurse.
Within minutes, she said hundreds of other people were streaming into the hospital with cuts, bruises and other injuries.
“People were banging on the door, crying for staff to let them in. It wasn’t a shelter but they couldn’t just let them stay outside and die,” she said.
When the second half of the storm started to hit, there was no running water and little space to hold the growing number of people seeking refuge.
“Millionaires were sharing the same space with people living in shanty towns,” Dorsett said. “The toilets were running over with faeces, floodwater was everywhere. At that particular time, kids, families, everyone were just all over the floor just trying to survive.”
BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL
As people became hungry, anger and anxiety fuelled tempers.
Once the hurricane had finally passed, escaping the misery could not come soon enough for Dorsett and her relatives, and they were only too happy when they got a message to try to get to the airport.
Her voice cracking at times, the broken mom fought back tears to detail the sight of bodies floating in the water and the stench of decomposing human flesh as they navigated debris on Wednesday to get to the airport in Abaco.
It’s where they would spend their last night on the ravaged island, before their departure early Thursday morning for Nassau.
Dorsett said there was relief as the plane ascended, but a glance through the window of the small aircraft jolted her back to the reality of an entire island left in shambles.
“I was in shock that we actually survived. I could not believe that we went through that,” she said, struggling to shrug off the trauma to begin third-year studies at The University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago.
“There’s nothing there! There is absolutely nothing there!”
She said even worse, it is now a literal battle for survival.
Before she was evacuated, Dorsett saw people banging on the hospital doors with weapons, saying it was unfair for some people to be evacuated before others.
Businesses were also being broken into by gunmen and people with weapons were seeking to guard what was left of their properties.
Up to late yesterday, the official death toll was at 43. However, the Bahamian government has warned that as the recovery continues, the numbers could rise to staggering levels.
Body bags were being imported, and refrigerators and morticians were being flown into Bahamas to embalm bodies, since there was not enough space to hold the deceased.