By RACHEL KNOWLES, THE NEW YORK TIMES
(Published Sept. 5, 2019 Updated Sept. 6, 2019, 11:50 a.m. ET) NASSAU, the Bahamas — The roof had blown clean off. Outside, the ocean surged, swallowing the land. Brent Lowe knew he had to escape — and take his 24-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and can’t walk, with him.
But Mr. Lowe had another problem. He’s blind.
So he put his grown son on his shoulders, then stepped off his porch, he said. The swirling current outside came up to his chin.
“It was scary, so scary,” said Mr. Lowe, 49.
Clutching neighbors, he said he felt his way to the closest home still standing. It was five minutes — an eternity — away.
Stories of unlikely survival have slowly emerged in the days since Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, pummeling the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco for days before moving toward the Atlantic Seaboard.
While the damage has been visible from above, the full human toll is still far from certain, with 30 deaths confirmed so far and the authorities warning that the real number may be much higher.
The death count “could be staggering,” said Dr. Duane Sands, the minister of health, who updated the toll late Thursday.
Some neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, almost entirely flattened by the storm. In others, 95 percent of homes have been damaged or destroyed.
Thousands of people are now homeless, taking refuge in gymnasiums or churches, and the authorities are bracing for an influx of bodies as the extent of the destruction becomes clear.
“We are embalming bodies so that we have more capacity as new bodies are brought in,” Dr. Sands said. “We need to get coolers into Abaco and Grand Bahama, because we believe that we may not have the capacity to store the bodies.”
Sandra Cooke, a resident of Nassau, the capital, said her sister-in-law had been trapped under a collapsed roof in the Abaco Islands.
At first, her brother couldn’t find his wife — then the family dog detected her in the rubble. When there was a break in the storm, neighbors helped free her.
“She was trapped under the roof for 17 hours,” said Ms. Cooke. She hired a private helicopter service to bring the rescued woman to Nassau, she said.
When Hurricane Dorian first made landfall on Sunday, Mr. Lowe recalled, all of its fury seemed to bear down on him.
The storm raging outside was one of the most powerful ever to sweep through the Atlantic. Its eye was approaching and the group of eight people inside Mr. Lowe’s cement house was particularly vulnerable.
In addition to Mr. Lowe and his disabled son, neighbors whose homes had already been destroyed were also sheltering there. Among them were two children.
As the storm howled around them, Mr. Lowe said, the roof began to lift off, then slap back down. Abaco withstood sustained winds of up to 185 miles per hour that day, with gusts that reached 220 miles per hour. The group sought safety in the bathroom, where they huddled together and prayed, hoping for relief. Mr. Lowe’s son was nestled inside the bathtub, he said.
That’s when the roof flew away.
Exposed to the elements, each person had to step out into the storm. They clung to each other and set out to find refuge.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life,” said Mr. Lowe, who is no stranger to hurricanes but said he could never have imagined the terror of that day.
The group reached a neighbor’s home. Mr. Lowe and his son hunkered down there for a day until a rescue bus was able to pick them up on Monday and take them to a shelter.
On Tuesday night, he was evacuated to Nassau, where Mr. Lowe can get the dialysis treatment he needs three times a week. His son had to stay in Abaco, in the care of Mr. Lowe’s sister-in-law, he said.
“I came here with the clothes that I had on from Saturday,” he said.
Although Mr. Lowe and his son are now safe, his ordeal is, in some ways, only beginning.
He didn’t know if his eldest daughter made it through the storm, he said. The phone lines have been down for days and communication with Abaco is very difficult.
“Right before we had the wind, I spoke with her,” he said. “I wish I could have been able to call and ask somebody, you know, because I really was worried about them. I was worried about everybody.”
So many people have been pushed from their homes by the hurricane that in Marsh Harbour, the main town on Abaco, as many as 2,000 people were seeking shelter in a clinic and a government complex. Officials warned that tent cities might have to be set up to accommodate the many survivors.
There are also environmental concerns. The Norwegian energy company Equinor said an oil storage terminal on the island of Grand Bahama had been damaged. The terminal was leaking, the company said, though it was too early to tell how much oil had spilled.
From the air, the storage tanks appeared to have no lids. The domed tops of five of tanks were “gone,” a company spokesman said.
Bahamian officials urged their citizens to be unified.
“There are no words to convey the grief we feel for our fellow Bahamians in the Abacos and Grand Bahama,” Dionisio D’Aguilar, the tourism and aviation minister, said in a statement. “Now is the time to come together for our brothers and sisters in need, and help our country get back on its feet.”
Like many of his neighbors, Mr. Lowe is now homeless. After a lifetime on the outskirts of Marsh Harbour — where he raised a family and worked as a butcher in a fish house until he lost his eyesight to diabetes — his home, his community and everything he built has been obliterated.
Still, Mr. Lowe wants to return to Abaco.
“I have to go,” he said. “That’s where my family is. My kids are there, my brothers, my sisters, they’re all there.”
(Photo Credit: Daniele Volpe for The New York Times)
But he is unsure of its future. The damage is catastrophic.
In the area where he lived, “90 percent of the houses are compromised,” he said. “I’m talking about roofs gone, houses totally collapsed everywhere.”
He added, “I’m just wondering where we’re going to live when I go back home, what I’m going to do.”
Frances Robles contributed reporting from Miami.
