The Tribune

The first relief expert into Crooked Island found unprecedented hurricane damage for a Bahamian island. Darren Adler tells The Tribune about rescues, necessities and evacuations.

AN experienced disaster relief expert has described the “horrendous” devastation he found when he was part of the first team to set foot on Crooked Island after Hurricane Joaquin had roared through it at the start of October.

Darren Adler, a British disaster relief expert with HOPE (Humanitarian Operation Foundation) who has responded to the hurricanes in the Bahamas in the last 12 years, told The Tribune “this is the worst state I’ve ever seen a Bahamian island in after any hurricane”.

Mr Adler, who has worked in disaster relief in Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Asian tsunami, New Orleans after Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, emphasised that the situation in the Bahamas after Joaquin is not minor in comparison. “This is Hurricane Katrina for the Bahamas and anyone who thinks its less than that really hasn’t got the picture,” he said.

“It sounds alarmist but I want to put it into perspective. Crooked Island was like Haiti without the fatalities. Bearing in the mind that the buildings are quite separate and the population about a 100th, the devastation was the same. The roads were impassable, you couldn’t get from one area to another, you were walking in six feet of water but you were stepping over power cables and poles.

“The damage was done, and it became obvious, when the hurricane sat virtually still for 12 hours. A stalled category 4 hurricane is life-threatening. I would have expected worse than I saw. A cat 4 hurricane stalled for 30 odd hours ... I was genuinely amazed that there was not a greater degree of damage. A cat 4 that stalls - you’d expect Hell. The fact that anything was standing in any of these locations ... someone was looking down from Heaven and saying ‘I’m not going to make you pay yet’. It defied logic.”

On October 3, Mr Adler saw from the air that Crooked Island and Acklins seemed to be “horrendous” and and found “mass devastation” on arriving on the ground the next day.

“The sea surge that came in probably left two or three feet of the houses unexposed. What that means is someone standing the attic would have two to three feet of air space. We know this from talking to people and from evidence in the buildings,” he said. He described how he had found that the sea water had travelled inland from half a mile up to two miles on Crooked Island. It brought boulders into the shore, into people’s living rooms and flushed them out of the other side of the buildings.

“No less than five per cent of the structures were habitable,” he said. “Most of the properties were uninhabitable. This we saw from the air on Saturday. We got boots on the ground on Sunday with four Defence Force officers - Emerson Moss, Cyncarreo Collie, Zhivargo Green and Petty Officer Philip Daxon.”

“This is the worst state I’ve ever seen a Bahamian island in after any hurricane. When we were getting reports that Long Island was worse I was horrified from seeing what I was dealing with. I thought ‘Heaven help the people there’.”

Mr Adler said the island’s helpful police inspector allowed them to take over his office. “There were no windows, no doors, the counters were in disarray. It was a mess but it was the only building near the airport still standing.” The group arrived with only limited aid, mostly medical supplies and established a command centre.

“It quickly became apparent that a man, Ernest Moss, had gone missing. The house he was staying had been cut off and he hadn’t been heard from for two or three days.” Mr Adler said the road had been washed away so he and officer Moss and CPO Daxon set out to find him. “We were told it was four miles beyond the break in the road,” he said. “It turned out it was 13 miles. We ran and swam most of the way.”

Mr Adler said that about 4,000 feet of road had disappeared into the sea and the ground had been eroded to a depth of eight to ten feet. Also, a bridge had gone. He described how they waded through the water, which “was sometimes above our heads”. The group decided they had to leave the stretcher they were carrying.

“We eventually found him sitting in a chair, looking at a wall. He was in shock. He had run out of food, water had long gone. His complexion was very grey from dehydration. If you are without water for three days, death is very imminent. He was past day two. Water had gone through the house and washed his furniture out the back. I do not know how this man was alive - genuinely - in this situation. The building around him had collapsed, much of the ceiling had come in along with most of his windows.”

“We had three hours to get back to be collected. We found a bicycle, put him on that and wheeled him. We had to carry him through the water. We realised he was in more and more of a mess. Both CPO Daxon and I thought he would not survive. When we got him back to Colonel Hill he couldn’t speak.”

Mr Moss, a retired Batelco employee, was medically evacuated to Nassau that day. “For him the biggest shock seemed to be ‘I’ve lost everything, I don’t know what to do’,” Mr Adler said. “That was possibly one of the most amazing stories of the hurricane. The three of us sat there afterwards and said ‘that was a good day’.”

Mr Adler praised the relief efforts that swung into action in the immediate aftermath. “TIA (Trans Island Airways) have been fantastic, they did an amazing job. They basically provided until Sunday the food to sustain Crooked Island. Some people were in ok situations and had food, some didn’t. We found four to six families in a room with no furniture, roofs blown off, in the dark, no electricity, nothing to cook with.”

“The island had become three islands due to the roads being cut off. There was Landrail Point - a community of about 50 people - which had been separated off, because you couldn’t make your way from Pitts Town airport, the only airport open at the time.” He said his group were the first people into Landrail Point on the Monday. They were taken by helicopter by the Royal Navy as the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Lyme Bay’s landing craft couldn’t get in as parts of the dock were not working there.

The team split into two, with two people doing search and rescue and the other three doing supplies. Mr Adler described the help he received from the RBDF officers as “unprecedented” and was grateful to them.

The team began loading up trucks with food brought in by TIA, performed assessments of the properties and the general living situations. “It immediately became apparent that people couldn’t cook for themselves so we set up a communal kitchen. These people were in a desperate situation. There were three existing main centres where people were trying to prepare food. We gave everyone a one-day ration of food. We had probably two to three days rations. I knew the Royal Navy vessel was coming and I knew looking at the houses that the people couldn’t live in them.”

Mr Adler said that there were two houses at Major’s Cay, one of which was uninhabitable. The other was being lived in but they gave the residents tarpaulins to cover the hole in the roof. Even at that early stage the reponse was good. “Every private agency worked together, it was seamless. Rotary at Odyssey Aviation - there was a container ready to go. Ports International provided medical supplies and they literallly laid it out and said ‘what do you need?’ People were helpful, offering generators etc.”

Mr Adler had scouted from the air on Saturday. “There’s no point in going down to a location beforehand,” he explained. “If you can see property damage, that there’s no shelter etc. No electricity, so food is spoiling. With no ability to refrigerate, then you must supply food.”

The assessment of the affected residents is done on a first come, first served basis. ‘Are you capable of making it through today’ is the judgment. Give them something that can get them through the day,” he said.

The team decided to ‘medivac’ people immediately, including those who had diabetes as there was no ability to refrigerate medicines so they had to go.

“There was an elderly lady, she must have been around 60, and she had hypertension. She had her medication. She had a form of machine she was trying to explain to me she had for her diabetes but she didn’t want to go because her mother was lying on the sofa and there were pools of water. It must have been around 11 o’clock at night. It was dark. I said ‘no we can’t go now’ so we came back the next day and medivaced her. And they willingly went.”

Mr Adler worked with the Royal Navy once the Lyme Bay arrived off Crooked Island after the government had asked for help. “A helicopter was sent up immediately and circled Pitts Town and Colonel Hill, where we flagged it down,” Mr Adler said. He was taken to the ship, where he briefed the captain and recommended a plan to evacuate women and children. The Navy offered support as this was a potential loss of life situation.

“When you evacuate someone from a home, you’re not doing because they are not comfortable, you are doing it because they can’t look after themselves. You live in a house that’s under two feet of water after a week you have got to be careful as disease sets in. There is no legal basis to do a forced evacuation in the Bahamas like there is in America. We didn’t need to.

“There are techniques to convince people to go. With a recommended evacuation you explain to people why they should go. With a forced evacuation you tell people to go as the population can’t sustain itself.

“People were very confused and very shocked. I said to them if they had friends and relatives in Nassau, go now. There was no ability to keep them there, no schools, nowhere to send them. The Administrator’s office had gone. The clinic was still there but parts of the island couldn’t access it. It was a logistical mess.”

“Since 2004 and (Hurricane) Frances we have always been on the ground responding in the Bahamas. We have never said we need to get people out before. Today was the first time we said that.”

Residents, Mr Adler said, had four basic decisions to make: Where am I going to stay? What am I going to take? Am I going to get back? Have I now, by going, lost everything? “They were making those decisons in five to ten minutes.”

“The first person we encountered had two children and a disabled mother - they said ‘we are going now, take us now, do not leave us here’. It was the right thing. People were driving relatives through water to the airport because they wanted them to go. They were sleeping in the open, they had no walls, no windows, nothing.”

He found three children left on their own as their mother had gone to Nassau and not been able to get back.

The evacuation plan was hampered by planes being diverted - to be expected in a disaster, he said. Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade helped get people out on the Tuesday, mostly to Nassau and some to Exuma. “We were putting people on any flight that could get them out and Exuma could fly at night.”

HOPE is an independent organisation which works closely with a number of government entities. Mr Adler said the US has always been very supportive and that HOPE has a good relationship with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Pan American Health Organisation and the Royal Navy. HOPE deals with disasters worldwide and Mr Adler’s last operation had been in Syria. “We are all ex-pilots and we are boots on the ground,” Mr Adler said. “We look and assess and try to link in with as many organisations as possible. Disaster is a disaster because it can’t be controlled but it can be dealt with. You can’t manage a disaster. People have tried for years to manage a disaster and haven’t succeeded.”