A12 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 , 2019
JOSE JIMENEZ/GETTY IMAGES
TOP: A U.S. Coast Guard crew evacuates people from Marsh Harbour, Bahamas, to Nassau on Thursday. The service has 1,000 members
positioned to help in the Bahamas and the United States. ABOVE LEFT: Coast Guardsmen medevac a patient from a Marsh Harbour
hospital Tuesday. ABOVE RIGHT: Margo Saintilien, 8, waves to a helicopter on Great Abaco Island on Friday. Her family lost its home.She had been with her parents,
sister and a 7-year-old nephew,
and was evacuated with her
mother, who suffers heart ail-
ments. McKenzie said she saw a
truck filled with bodies headed to
the morgue Thursday.
As t he Coast Guard transported
them to Nassau, McKenzie’s
mother, S andra, thanked the s erv-
ice members. “You are a blessed
people,” she said, near tears.
The U.S. Agency for Interna-
tional Development, which is
overseeing the American relief ef-
fort in the B ahamas, has delivered
emergency shelter materials for
35,000 people, and hygiene and
water containers for about 3,000.
John Morrison, spokesman for
Urban Search and Rescue Vir-
ginia Task Force 1, based in Fairfax
County, said the group was work-
ing with USAID and dispatching
57 rescue workers and four dogs
to search house to house for vic-
tims or people in need. An aerial
survey of the storm’s p ath showed
that at least half of homes and
buildings were destroyed.
The humanitarian crisis could
have ripple effects: One search-
and-rescue volunteer who deliv-
ered supplies to Grand Bahama
this week said he saw at least 26
boats, overloaded with people,
leaving the island and heading
west to Florida, about 140 miles
away. “They’re doing what they
can to get off the island,” said Russ
Montgomery, who goes on search-
and-rescue missions coordinated
by the CrowdSource Rescue
group. He said that people he met
on the hard-hit northern islands
are not waiting on help from the
Bahamian government, but in-
stead were making cooking fires
with debris from destroyed hous-
es and drinking rainwater out of
truck beds.
In Freeport, a group of about a
dozen friends reported that they
had conducted rescues via per-
sonal w atercraft Tuesday, p arking
in some cases on people’s roofs to
save them.
Desean Smith, 39, said in a
phone interview that his cousin
had called him during the storm
as her home began flooding.
Within an hour, the water had
risen f rom her ankles to her waist,
and it was chest-level when Smith
arrived on his watercraft.
He took his cousin and her
family to higher ground and saw
many more people who needed to
be rescued. He estimated that he
and his friends transported 40
people to safety in two hours.
“It’s like a war zone,” Smith
said. “All of the landscape, every-
thing that was green and lush
before, is dead.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Lamothe reported from Washington
and Faiola from Marsh Harbour,
Bahamas. Lori Rozsa in West Palm
Beach, Fla., and Rachelle Krygier in
Miami contributed to this report.unrelated to the storm.
Roberts said that during the
storm, golf carts flew in the air.
Stone houses shifted off their
foundations. Some saw tornadoes
rip into the ground.
Other victims traveling on the
helicopter told harrowing tales of
barely surviving and of many
more dead, swept away.
Schamere McKenzie, 22, a su-
permarket cashier from Murphy
To wn, said her family fled their
home as the hurricane ripped it
apart. They survived in their
Buick.ming pools were filled with murky
brown water.
On the ground, Willis Levarity,
48 — who on ordinary days is the
“director o f fun” a t a resort featur-
ing paddle boarding, golfing and
swimming — waved his hands at
the crew. The helicopter landed
on a golf course.
Gina Roberts, 52, boarded with
her daughter Shannon, 34, a Ty pe
1 diabetic whose insulin supply
was running low. Roberts had to
leave her husband behind. That
morning, she received word that
her father had died of an illnesszero.” His first task on the flight
was to find a group trapped in a
garage near Marsh Harbour. But
there was no place to land the
MH-60 Jayhawk.
Others already on the ground
could help them, so he headed
north to Guana Cay, where there
were American citizens a nd Baha-
mians in need of medical atten-
tion, including a woman who was
running out of insulin.
From the air, Menze and his
crew saw a car that had been
hurled on top of a boat. Houses
were smashed into sticks. Swim-ed constantly, as more urgent
medical cases were called in and
more survivors were found.
In one case Tuesday, they res-
cued a man who had been trapped
for 16 hours under the collapsed
remains of his house.
Overall, they took 30 people to
the hospital Thursday, and 17
more a day earlier, as Air Force
and Marine Corps teams have
worked to assess the damage to
runways and other i nfrastructure.
Flying over the Abaco Islands
in his helicopter Friday, Menze
said the area is “kind of groundtown in the Abaco Islands, was
devastated by the storm, as were
surrounding areas. Te ams in
hazmat suits are searching for
survivors and bodies amid storm
debris, storing remains in a refrig-
erated container in the back of a
health clinic.
Already, the United States is
expanding its response, amid
signs that the scope of the e ffort so
far has not been enough. As many
as 43 people have been confirmed
dead — 3 5 in the Abaco Islands
and eight in Grand Bahama — but
the number was expected to rise.
Thousands of people are possibly
missing and tens of thousands
may need urgent help.
“We acknowledge that there
are many missing and that the
number of deaths is expected to
significantly increase,” Prime
Minister Hubert Minnis said in a
statement Friday night. “This is
one of the stark realities we are
facing in this hour of darkness.”
The Coast Guard has expanded
its presence from five rescue heli-
copters on Monday to a dozen,
along with eight cutters. The serv-
ice has 1,000 members positioned
to assist with relief efforts in the
Bahamas and across the south-
eastern United States.
Rear Adm. Douglas Fears said
his service has carried out 208
rescues in the Bahamas this week
and staged helicopters on Andros
Island, a sparsely populated ar-
chipelago south of Grand B ahama
Island, whose northern side was
overwhelmed by the storm.
Aboard the USCGC James, a
national security cutter that is
coordinating the Coast Guard’s
rescue response in the Bahamas,
service members monitored air
traffic on computer scanners and
tracked emergency calls on a
whiteboard a s they prioritized the
most desperate cases.
A 5-month-old was “starving,”
one report said. A 90-year-old
man had a broken back, read
another. Two diabetics, two chil-
dren and one spouse, read a t hird.
A woman somewhere on a base-
ball field had a decreasing heart
rate. A 60-year-old man needed
dialysis, and a 400-pound man
was suffering from blood clots.
George F. M enze, a Coast Guard
pilot, said he wished there were a
clinic closer to the affected islands
than the hospital in Nassau, a trip
that can take 45 minutes by heli-
copter. But he said the response is
typical for a hurricane as devas-
tating as Dorian, which he said
was “like a giant tornado.”
Service members on the James
dispatched helicopters across the
ravaged area, sometimes with lit-
tle more than coordinates t o go o n
and no way to communicate with
people on the ground. Plans shift-
RESCUE FROM A
Ye t climate change has pushed
the system to its limits. Rising sea
levels have created a higher floor
for storm surge to ride on top of,
producing more frequent and
more catastrophic f loods.
“The water levels in the ocean
and the sound are changing,” Cor-
bett s aid. “When you h ave 100 m ile
per hour winds blowing it up
against the island, t here’s no place
for i t to go b ut i nundate.”
The scientist has noticed his
neighbors become increasingly
concerned about the fate of their
islands. Efforts to “renourish”
beaches with additional sand are
washed away by the next storm.
Rows of homes that once looked
out onto the ocean have been lost
to the incoming waters.
Cooper acknowledged the
threat posed to his state by c limate
change while visiting a feeding
station in Wilmington o n Friday.
“We know these storms now,
unfortunately, are a new normal
for us. We’ve had three hurricanes
in the state of North Carolina in
less than three years,” he said, in a
nod to Florence and 2016’s Hurri-
cane Matthew. “ We h ave a lot to do
to become more resilient. We have
a lot to do to rebuild not only
stronger b ut smarter.”
Kitty Hawk resident John Tru-
bich, who waited out Dorian’s
downpour in the same home
where h e endured countless other
storms, was more resigned. The
future, he said, is in the hands of
Mother Nature.
“The Outer Banks was made by
wind and water,” he said. “Even-
tually, t hey’ll take it away.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Ro ss, a freelance journalist, reported
from New Bern, N.C.; Thebault
reported from Myrtle Beach, S.C.; and
Kaplan reported from Washington.
Patricia Sullivan in Wilmington, N.C.;
Jim Morrison in Norfolk; and Mark
Berman and Jason Samenow in
Washington contributed to this report.ate remained stranded without
power. Emergency responders
were forced to wait for the weath-
er to break before they could deliv-
er aid and rescue people via heli-
copter.
Hyde County officials helped
airlift several people with medical
issues and spent Friday evening
canvassing neighborhoods to en-
sure other residents were safe. But
many were waiting to leave, hop-
ing that regular ferry service
would soon be r estored.
The Outer Banks have always
been especially vulnerable to
rough weather. The string of pen-
insulas and barrier islands, 200
miles long and never more than
three miles w ide, a re the first land
masses to be bombarded by water
and wind coming off the Atlantic.
The ocean regularly overtops
dunes and washes out much of
Highway 12 — the only road link-
ing Hatteras Island and the rest of
Dare County. The ferry from Hat-
teras to Ocracoke had to change
routes after its usual run began
filling in with sand. During strong
storms, water will carve out new
inlets and wash away acres of
beach.
For years, the island chain has
been slowly shifting west, toward
the mainland, beaten back by the
encroaching sea. Dorian clipped
its southern reaches before
launching e astward.
These alterations are nature’s
way of redistributing the tremen-
dous energy of the ocean, ex-
plained Kitty H awk resident R eide
Corbett, a coastal oceanographer
at East Carolina University and
executive director of the Coastal
Studies Institute in Manteo. The
term “barrier i slands” r efers to the
way these landforms protect
coastlines through their shape-
shifting.
“It’s a dynamic system,” C orbett
said. The resilience of the North
Carolina coastline — not to men-
tion some 30,000 year-round resi-
dents and a billion-dollar tourism
industry — depend o n it.neighborhoods and spilling over
window sills. Emergency officials
urged people to stay indoors and
move to the h ighest p oints i n their
homes.
Though a mandatory evacua-
tion order had been issued forDare County, many in the Outer
Banks opted to remain in their
homes. Longtime residents, who
can r ecite t he names o f past hurri-
canes like a list of bad exes, are
accustomed to weathering
storms.
The beach communities — ac-
cessible only by bridge, boat or
plane even in the best of weather
— became all but unreachable as
90 mph winds and torrential rain
battered the c oastline. An e stimat-
ed 800 people who did not evacu-the s torm’s w aning winds.
William Stiles, head of Wet-
lands Watch, a local nonprofit fo-
cusing on sea-level rise, was out
mapping flooding in Norfolk on
Friday.
“This one was just weird,” hesaid. “It was j ust the w ater. Not the
wind. Not the howling horizontal
rain we normally get with a hurri-
cane.”
The threat of f lash f looding still
loomed, though. And as reports of
devastation emerged from the
overwhelmed Outer Banks, North
Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) not-
ed that many people are still at
risk.
Photos and video from Ocra-
coke showed swift-moving, w hite-
capped water rushing throughand water.
When Dorian finally dislodged
and swerved north Tuesday, the
storm skirted the U.S. coastline, its
outer edges scraping by Florida,
Georgia and most of the Carolinas.
In southeastern North Carolina,
where many are still recovering
from the devastation caused by
Hurricane Florence last year, resi-
dents were relieved to escape the
worst o f it this time.
“When you’re looking at what’s
going on in the Bahamas, and you
see this massive storm heading
right for you, you’re going to be
getting worried,” s aid To ny Catul-
lo, a Myrtle Beach, S.C., resident
who spent Friday afternoon sun-
bathing along the shore. After
days of doom-filled forecasts, the
mood here was relaxed: The local
country radio station was adver-
tising live music and the “premier
hurricane p arty.”
“We dodged a bullet here,” Ca-
tullo said.
People in Wilmington, N.C., re-
turned home Friday morning to
surf beneath clearing skies. In O n-
slow County, to the n orth, s wiftwa-
ter r escuers had little work to do.
“This ain’t n othing,” s aid T hom-
as Goff, of Onslow Fire and Res-
cue. “I’ve seen pop-up thunder-
storms d o more damage.”
No serious injuries or fatalities
from the hurricane have been re-
ported in the United States,
though North Carolina and Flori-
da officials have listed other
deaths that appear related to
storm preparations and evacua-
tions, including a man who fell
from a ladder and people who
collapsed under the stress of relo-
cating. As of Friday morning, 75
roads were closed across North
Carolina as the storm lashed the
coastline — compared with the
750 road closures reported at the
same time during Hurricane Flor-
ence last year.
Virginia’s Hampton Roads re-
gion experienced some limited
flooding during high tide on Fri-
day, b ut there was little e ffect fromof its destruction through swift
and severe storm surge from the
Pamlico Sound, the long lagoon
that separates the islands f rom the
North Carolina mainland. Power-
ful winds sucked water away from
the coast, then pushed it back in a
massive wave onto the western
sides of Hatteras and Ocracoke
islands. In less than two hours,
tide gauges measured a water lev-
el increase o f more t han s even feet
— enough to submerge a home’s
first-floor w indows.
“The water just poured in and
has continued to do so,” said
Vankevich, who runs t he Ocracoke
Observer, the island’s main news
source. “If you were out there
walking around, you could have
been swept away.”
By early afternoon, the storm’s
eyewall had moved northwest and
away from shore. It is expected to
scrape by southeastern New Eng-
land on Saturday, then strike parts
of Nova S cotia a nd N ewfoundland
before it finally spins out into the
North Atlantic after a long and
deadly slog across the hemi-
sphere.
Dorian began brewing into one
of the strongest hurricanes o n rec-
ord more than a week ago,
prompting p anicked p reparations
in Florida and north through the
Carolinas. B ut i t was the Bahamas
that bore the brunt of the storm’s
fury; the tempest stalled for 40
hours directly over the island
chain, laying waste to much o f two
of its northern territories — Great
Abaco and Grand Bahama. The
official death toll stood at 43 Fri-
day night but that is likely to be
just a fraction of the total death
toll, as entire communities were
decimated by storm surges that
topped 20 feet and winds that
gusted t o 220 mph.
Thousands of Bahamians made
homeless by the storm are squat-
ting in broken, abandoned homes
or are scrambling for floor space
in shelters without steady food
DORIAN FROM A
Storm again exposes vulnerabilities of N.C. barrier islands
Rescuers work to save the starving, sick and stranded
ELIJAH NOUVELAGE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
People work Friday to repair damage from a tornado that spun off
from Hurricane Dorian and hit the area the day before at the
Boardwalk RV Park in Emerald Isle, N.C.PETTY OFFICER 3RD CLASS HUNTER MEDLEY/U.S. COAST GUARD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESPETTY OFFICER 3RD CLASS BRANDON MURRAY/U.S. COAST GUARD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES“When you have 100 mile per hour winds
blowing [water] up against the island, there’s
no place for it to go but inundate.”
Reide Corbett, Kitty Hawk resident and coastal oceanographer