A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 , 2019
on cays near the Abacos. Com-
munication has been difficult,
she said, and their situation is
dire.
“It’s all gone,” she said. “They,
the prime minister, the authori-
ties, aren’t even talking about
those keys, they haven’t even
flown over those c ays. It’s f lat like
the ground we’re standing on.”
In Freeport on Grand Bahama,
60-year-old Gail Woon described
a “taxing” night in a shelter.
Someone opened a window, and
the roof collapsed.
Woon and the others there ran
to a church — one of the few
structures, she said, that didn’t
collapse or flood.
“Buildings here are only built
to withstand 150-mph winds,”
she said. “We have no chance.”
Woon returned to her flooded
home on Wednesday, to salvage
what she could. A generator
chugged power.
She had lived through Hurri-
canes Frances and Jeanne in
2004.
“This was nothing like those,”
she said. “This was something
that we never experienced be-
fore.”
[email protected]Maria Sacchetti aboard the U.S.
Coast Guard Cutter Paul Clark in the
Atlantic Ocean and Jasper Ward in
Nassau contributed to this report.the storm, concerned relatives
gathered at the international air-
port in the hope of receiving
loved ones evacuated from the
northern islands — or, at least,
word that they were okay.
Sandra C ooke has family living“The magnitude of destruc-
tion is catastrophic,” said Lt.
Cmdr. Kristopher Ensley, the
captain of the 1 54-foot Coast
Guard Cutter Paul Clark. “It’s
tragic.”
In Nassau, spared the worst ofCoast Guard helicopters air-
lifted patients from the hardest-
hit islands to medical facilities in
Nassau, the capital. The British
Royal Navy, aid groups and vol-
unteers joined in rescue and
relief efforts.boats, wrecked, on the streets,”
Kelly said. The water supply is
contaminated with gasoline and
feces.
Kelly said the apartment
where he has been staying since
his house was destroyed was
robbed on Tuesday. Stolen, he
said, were his cellphone, batter-
ies, food, water.
His feet were cut and infected
from days in flooded streets.
He said the community also
pulled together, sharing food,
water and shelter.
“There’s no curfew, because
there is no o ne here to enforce i t,”
he said. “We’re four days in and
they are still ‘assessing the situa-
tion.’ ”
Seventeen of the Bahamas’
20 confirmed deaths from
Dorian have been on the Abacos.
Prime Minister Hubert Minnis
described the losses: 60 percent
of houses in Marsh Harbour
damaged. The Mudd, a shanty-
town of Haitian workers, de-
stroyed. The airport underwater.
But there was misery on other
islands. The storm, which struck
Sunday as a Category 5 hurri-
cane, spent 40 slow hours from
Sunday to Tuesday grinding
across Grand Bahama.
The death count was expected
to rise as search efforts spread to
more a reas that were flattened by
the storm.ings for the Abacos, Grand Baha-
ma, Bimini and other battered
islands.
But fear here is spreading.
“We need tarps. We need medi-
cal supplies. We need more wa-
ter. We need chain saws,” said
boat captain Rontonio Levarity,
- “We can’t do this alone.”
Levarity’s Mako yacht was
smashed to pieces in the storm.
The Washington Post flew to
Grand Abaco on a helicopter
chartered by World Central
Kitchen. The island came into
view 25 minutes out of Nassau:
the white sand beaches and tur-
quoise waters of the northern
half, largely spared Dorian’s
wrath. In the south, watery cays
and island scrub show nature’s
blitzkrieg.
Much of the island is still
flooded. Homes remain sub-
merged. Inland brush has turned
to marshland. There are forests
of fallen trees.
Marsh Harbour lived off tour-
ism. But the infrastructure has
been flattened. Two power plants
were crippled. The marinas, de-
stroyed. Abacos Big Bird, the
local chicken farm, was leveled.
“People are desperate,” said
Travis Kelly, a 33-year-old boat
captain.
“There’s a fleet of 100 fishing
BAHAMAS FROM A
hurricane dorian
BY KIRK ROSS
AND FRANCES STEAD SELLERSnew bern, n.c. — A year after
Hurricane Florence poured about
8 trillion gallons of water over
North Carolina, Te resa Seal is still
trying to rebuild.
She and her husband have been
living in one upstairs room while
they repair their home’s ground
floor, which was saturated by
three feet of water in the 2018
storm. Neighbors are camped out
in RVs, outside of homes unable
to withstand another soaking. If
Hurricane Dorian strikes, it will
be this neighborhood’s third ma-
jor storm in three years.
For Seal, 51, Dorian is the latest
confirmation that climate change
may one day cause catastrophic
damage to her home, but she has
no interest in moving.
“I just don’t feel like starting
over,” Seal said. “I told my hus-
band, I don’t care if we have to
tent out on the dirt right now —
I’m not leaving.”
It’s the kind of attitude that
North Carolina officials are com-
bating, as climate change realism
settles over this once highly skep-
tical state. A triple blow of devas-
tating hurricanes — Matthew in
2016, Florence in September 2018
and Michael weeks later — has
had a profound impact on think-
ing here. The debate is no longer
about “if” another megastorm
will come but “when.”
As a result, state leaders are
attempting to shift their ap-
proach to extreme weather from
reactive to proactive. Among the
new strategies is an effort to buy
out homeowners in neighbor-
hoods that have been struck mul-
tiple times and move them to
safer locations. The state recently
established an Office of Recovery
and Resiliency in part to halt the
cycle of destruction and rebuild-
ing, identifying less-vulnerable
locations to move people like Seal
and her neighbors before they
have to be rescued by boat.
But here in New Bern — a river
town of about 30,000 people just
off North Carolina’s central coast
— the logistical and emotional
challenges of relocating are clear.
At a recent community meet-
ing about disaster recovery, resi-
dents asked state officials to find a
way to save the Stanley White
Recreation Center, which was
heavily damaged by floodwaters
in Hurricane Florence — but
without moving it.
The only other option, officials
said, is to raise the building at
least 11 feet. The facility is located
in a flood plain that didn’t exist
when it was built in the mid-
1970s.
“It’s been a pillar of the com-
munity for over 40 years,” said
New Bern Alderman Barbara
Best. “They don’t want to hear
that it can’t be rebuilt in its cur-
rent location.”
Best said it will take a lot of
public engagement by city, state
and federal officials to convince
residents to buy into the concept
of “resiliency,” t he steps a commu-
nity takes to anticipate and quick-
ly recover from increasingly fre-
quent and severe weather events.
Moving out of flood plains is a
key component of climate resil-
ience. But right now, Best said,
residents are deeply attached to
their homes and just want to get
back to their neighborhoods.“If they’re in a neighborhood
for years and years, it’s kind of
hard for the city to come to them
and say they can’t rebuild or they
have to elevate,” s he said. “People
don’t want to hear that. They just
don’t want to move.”
North Carolina’s new emphasis
on resiliency follows 16 other
states and the District of Colum-
bia that have developed compre-
hensive statewide climate adap-
tation plans. Many of the deci-
sions that affect resiliency are
made on a local or state level,
including adjusting building
codes and zoning laws, regulating
local utilities and upgrading
storm water systems.
In southeast Florida, four
counties — Broward, Miami-
Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach —
banded together a decade ago to
develop a regional “climate
change compact” that includes
long-term planning on repairing
beach erosion, creating salt- and
wind-resistant urban tree cano-
pies and increasing the use of
renewable energy sources. The
U.S. Climate Alliance, a biparti-san coalition of 25 governors
formed in 2017 after President
Trump announced he would
withdraw from the Paris agree-
ment, has extended its focus be-
yond reducing greenhouse gas
emissions to resilience, sharing
states’ plans for identifying their
climate vulnerabilities and ad-
dressing the risks.
Many advocates say more fed-
eral action is needed to mitigate
the property destruction and oth-
er losses caused by the universal
threat of climate change, which
has no respect for state borders.
“Some aspects of mitigation
simply work best at the federal
level,” said Heather Hurlburt, di-
rector of the New Models of Policy
Change project at New America.
“But we are seeing more action in
large cities and more on the state
level than the federal level.”
A spokesperson for the Federal
Emergency Management Agency,
responsible for federal disaster
response, said the agency is “com-
mitted to building resilient com-
munities,” i ncluding setting aside
6 percent of certain disaster ex-penses to provide funding for
reducing disaster risk. North
Carolina, for instance, recently
received federal funding for Hur-
ricane Matthew recovery that in-
cluded $168 million for buyouts
and elevating houses like Seal’s.
While the human and financial
costs of relocating communities
can be huge, the broader financial
considerations are compelling: A
2017 National Institute of Build-
ing Sciences report found that
every $1 spent on mitigation ef-
forts can save the nation $6 in
disaster spending.
In North Carolina, a change in
administrations drove the shift in
focus to climate resilience. Since
his election in 2016, Gov. Roy
Cooper (D) has pushed a com-
bined strategy of resilience and
greenhouse gas reduction, issu-
ing an executive order last year
that requires state agencies to
adopt policies that support pre-
paring for extreme weather, in-
stead of just responding to it.
Jessica Whitehead, a scientist
who worked with farmers and
small communities on climatechange adaptation, was tapped as
the state’s first chief resiliency
officer. The state’s director of
emergency management, Mike
Sprayberry, said Whitehead dis-
tilled the importance of integrat-
ing emergency management and
resiliency in an early conversa-
tion.
“She said the best rescue is the
one you don’t have to make be-
cause you already moved that
family out of the flood plain into
good, affordable housing,” he
said.
The state faces a daunting task
in a region where affordable
housing was scarce outside of the
flood plains even before the
storms. The new resiliency office
recently announced $16.6 million
to build 128 units in the inland
cities of in Fayetteville and Golds-
boro, but after Matthew and Flor-
ence, the deficit of affordable
housing in eastern North Caro-
lina went from 190,000 units to
300,000 units.
The office wants to find ways to
better leverage federal disaster
recovery funds to move residents
to higher ground before the next
flood. Given the region’s eco-
nomic struggles and the strong
attachment to place in many com-
munities, that will be a challenge,
Whitehead said, but a realization
is setting in that change is com-
ing.
“People are beginning to real-
ize that we can’t put things back
exactly the way that they were
and expect a different result,” s he
said.
Doug Harr, executive director
of Religious Community Services
in New Bern, which runs a shelter
and community kitchen, said that
with memories of Florence still
fresh, people are having a hard
time with the idea of Dorian, let
alone thinking further ahead.
“We’ll have to have therapists
in the streets if we get hit again
this month,” he said. “People will
not deal well emotionally.”
For Seal, a case worker for
residents still struggling with the
impacts of the storms, the ties to
home outweigh the realization
that extreme weather is a growing
threat. With Dorian looming, Seal
still believes her only option is to
rebuild her home, though hope-
fully higher than it sits now.
“If not, I guess I’ll just have to
build it back like it was and pray,”
she said.
[email protected]Se llers reported from Washington.
Ross is a freelance journalist based in
North Carolina.In N.C., recovery is an easy sell. Resiliency, not so much.
When adapting to climate
change means moving,
many residents resistIslanders, aid workers take stock of ‘catastrophic’ destruction in Bahamas
ELIJAH NOUVELAGE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Hoses extend to the ocean in anticipation of flooding before the arrival of Hurricane Dorian on Wednesday in Carolina Beach, N.C.
The state recently established an Office of Recovery and Resiliency in part to halt the cycle of destruction and rebuilding after storms.SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
Damage from Hurricane Dorian is seen Wednesday on Great Abaco in the Bahamas. The island’s
businesses, marinas and more were leveled. See a video of the destruction at wapo.st/bahamas.S0115-6x2.washington post .com/recipesSearch our database of tested recipes by ingredient or name.