Some Towns Left Behind as Bahamas Reawakens

WEST END, Bahamas ﾗ Here on the spit of Grand Bahama Island, Louanna Johnson sits on a piece of wood propped across the bare frame of a chair.

She is in front of the hut where she used to cook conch and crawfish. The hut is bare but for the lemon-yellow walls and picture-perfect view of emerald-green ocean.

The sea swallowed everything else during Hurricane Frances. It rose and rose and rose, flooding Johnson’s shack and sweeping across lands even miles away. Jeanne then struck, compounding the misery.

The people of West End are in shock. Johnson can’t immediately recall the name of her business.

“I forgot it now,” she says, squinting into the sun, pausing awhile. “Aaah, yes, the Seaside Grill.”

They are still absorbing the total devastation in this small fishing village. Some homeless laugh as they talk of returning to find nothing.

Frances struck the same day it did in South Florida, Sept. 4. Jeanne did too, three weeks later. Yet it seems like the hurricanes just hit.

There is still no power or water in this small town. An emergency water tanker sits by the road. All vegetation is burned brown by sea water. Every home still standing is broken. Junk heaps sit as high as the houses they once were. There are many of those.

A group of homeless pass the day in a church. A woman with the title “Lady” in front of her name, a real member of the gentry, has brought goods and clothing, among them formal gowns and high heels.

Gray-haired Alvord Smith finds just one possession, a bedsheet. Smith lost “e-vuh-ree-thing,” she says, underscoring her loss. Smith’s now living with a relative in another town. “I hope to come back home one day,” she says, smiling.

West End is not the most heavily visited area of Grand Bahama Island. Freeport is doing well, and huge resorts such as Our Lucaya may reopen soon. The majority of the island does have power. On the radio, pleas for tourists to return alternate between updates on damage estimates and power restorations.

“Grand Bahama is an OPEN island. Grand Bahama is an OPEN island,” the voice says cheerily.

The town of West End, though, is far-flung on an island in a nation of 700 islands spread across 100,000 square miles. It is far closer to West Palm Beach ﾗ a 30-minute flight away ﾗ than to the Bahamian capital, Nassau.

West End is not a priority. Or it certainly doesn’t seem to be.

Delivering ‘a message of hope’

Florida ramped up relief for the Bahamas after Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The Bahamian military set up camp in Cape Canaveral to ship supplies. Volunteer and government organizations flew in shipments.

Scott Lewis of West Palm Beach volunteered for 10 days heading a disaster relief center on the island of Great Abaco. Lewis is an unofficial Bahamian, having spent lots of time growing up on the islands.

But this hurricane season, Florida, too, is reeling. Lewis owns a landscaping business, of all things. He has worked weeks straight himself. He can’t pick up and leave like that again.

So Lewis cleaned out local stores of roof tarps last week and loaded them onto a private plane. He and volunteer pilot Bruce Case flew them to the islands of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama. The men are part of a faith-based disaster relief group, Eagle’s Wings.

“We can’t rebuild their houses for them, but we can do small things,” Lewis said, adding that the group desperately needs money. “We can bring a message of hope.”

On Great Abaco, a member of the Bahamian Parliament met the plane in a tropical shirt and baseball cap. Robert Sweeting greeted Lewis like an old friend. He and other prominent Abaconians were looking to Lewis as they still mulled how to get some sort of organized relief going.

Like Grand Bahama, Great Abaco also took a huge hit ﾗ but with Hurricane Jeanne. Salt water flooded nearly the entire business district in the main town of Marsh Harbour.

The president of the local chamber of commerce said Hurricane Floyd was “a joke” compared to this. “It’s as bad as it could get unless you have a lava flow,” Michael Albury said.

The water welled up inside one shuttered general store, swishing away precious merchandise three and four shelves up. Merchandise is precious in the Bahamas because most everything is shipped or flown in from the States. Duty taxes can double prices. A box of Puffs tissue runs almost $3.

Tackling third-world challenges

Disaster in the Bahamas sets in motion all kinds of conflicts. The people are fiercely independent, having shaken off British colonial rule in 1973. They are reluctant to ask for help even when they need it. They are also reluctant to broadcast to the world anything but crystal-clear water and bright beaches.

Then there’s the ever-present perception among international organizations that the Bahamas does not need help.

“People think we are laying on the beach having a drink with an umbrella in it,” said Beryl Armbrister, a Bahamian working with the American Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. “We’re not seen as a third-world country, but we have third-world problems.”

Armbrister was checking out water supply stations on Grand Bahama last week ﾗ giant “bladders” as they’re called, or “bleh-ders” as she says in her accent. They hold 2,500 gallons. Some she visited were empty, but she says the supply is fine.

U.S. government money has been approved for use in the area, but the $150,000 has yet to come, she said.

Official estimates of damage across the island nation total $200 million thus far with an estimated 6,700 buildings destroyed. The number of those without insurance is unknown.

In West End, Michael Ruffner of Fort Lauderdale runs a DevMat water de-salting machine at the edge of the ocean. From where he stands, he can see the row of rubbly homes, the large boat lying in the lane and Louanna Johnson’s gutted conch hut.

Ruffner also has worked on the Treasure Coast’s Hutchinson Island, which was beaten by the twin storms.

“All those people in mansions, they have insurance to help. These people? Probably not a one. You don’t see any Allstate agents out here.”

By Susan Spencer-Wendelﾠ- Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

For information on donating to the Bahamas, call Eagle’s Wings at 689-6283 or mail checks to 375 Possum Pass, West Palm Beach, Fla. 33413. Make checks payable to Eagle’s Wings Foundation. They are tax-deductible.