If you travel 200 miles due east of Miami, you will eventually hit the Abacos, a chain of islands and cays in the northern part of the Bahamas that over 17,000 people call home. Robert and Phyllis Cornea were among those people. As of Sunday, they were homeless.
“All the main buildings, gone,” Robert, a missionary who’d lived in the Abacos for 50 years, told CBS News. “It’s gone. Everything is gone.”
They’re not the only ones on the islands suffering unimaginable losses. In the catastrophic wake of Hurricane Dorian, which lashed the Bahamas Sunday as a devastating Category 5 storm, over 30 people are dead. At least one top-ranking Bahamian official expects that number to soar, CNN reported. The Red Cross estimates that nearly half the homes on the islands of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama have been severely damaged or destroyed, Time reported, and over 60,000 people will need assistance finding food and clean drinking water.
Coral Vita is one of the groups on the ground that has sprung into action to help the Bahamian people in Hurricane Dorian’s aftermath. Before the storm hit, it was devoted to restoring dying coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean. Now they’ve started a GoFundMe to support the “general on the ground help” that the reef restoration company intends to carry out.
“Many of our neighbors’ and friends’ houses are completely destroyed and much of the island is underwater,” Coral Vita said on its GoFundMe. “The people and country of the Bahamas urgently need help and supplies as soon as possible.”
The team pledges to use the money raised to bring “medicine, first-aid, water, generators, canned food, hygienic products and other basic essentials” to families on the island who need them most. Any leftover funds will go toward “long term rebuilding and relief efforts,” the group said.
Coral Vita cautions that humankind needs to take action now to build coastal ecosystems resilient enough to withstand our planet’s destabilizing climate.
“This storm is a prime example of how we need to protect, restore and create resilient coastal ecosystems that can adapt to climate change, shelter communities from natural disasters, and provide livelihoods for local populations,” the group said on its website. “In the long term, Coral Vita will continue to work to make that happen here and around the world, but for now we need all the help we can get to directly help those in The Bahamas in dire need.”
To find out more about how you can help their efforts, click here.
More: Giving Coral Reefs New Life
Tag: coral reef
How Dallas Became a Role Model for Community Policing, The Secret Streams That Keep Hawaii Pristine and More
A Different Beat, Texas Monthly
The sniper attack that killed five Dallas cops this summer shocked locals: “Why here?” they wondered. Unlike other racially diverse urban areas, police relations in this Texan metropolis were quite strong. Since 2010, Police Chief David Brown harped on the need for community policing — even after his own patrol cops called for his resignation — saying a team of 80 neighborhood specialists are the city’s best crime-fighting tool.
Uncovering the Potential of Honolulu’s Hidden Streams, Next City
Open a manhole cover on Oahu, and one might find a stream of crystal-clear freshwater, dotted with fish wriggling upstream — just one of the many auwai, or canals, that native Hawaiians dug, then paved over centuries later. In Honolulu, a city well known for its sandy beaches, architects are reclaiming the rest of the tropical island’s buried waterways to accent public parks, buffer against flooding and repair coral reefs damaged by impure runoff.
America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry, The New York Times
Several miles from New England’s shore, a brand-new energy project could have massive environmental ramifications. No, not oil drilling (with its hazardous spills), but the first-ever offshore wind farm. When three massive turbines near Block Island, R.I., begin twirling this October in the unobstructed Atlantic Ocean breezes (likely at faster, more consistent speeds than those on land), they could turbocharge the already booming renewable energy sector.
How Coral Reefs Might Resist Climate Change, America’s Coolest Mayor Runs for Senate and More
Unnatural Selection, The New Yorker
The ocean holds many wonders, but perhaps none are more precious and more fragile than its tropical coral reefs. Coral, at first sight, appears to be a lifeless rock, but it’s actually a miniature animal that houses an even smaller plant inside its cells — a symbiotic relationship developed over millennia. Ruth Gates, a University of Hawaii marine biologist, is attempting to speed up that evolutionary process and create a “super coral” by exposing it to the harsher conditions expected by next century: warmer, more acidic water caused by climate change. It’s a new take on conservation — call it “assisted evolution” — that’s also being tested on forests in Syracuse, N.Y., where a professor is genetically engineering a fungus-resistant chestnut tree. Can these scientists do what Mother Nature couldn’t?
This Mayor Wants To Give Struggling Cities a Front-Row Seat in D.C., Next City
Standing at 6’8” with a shaved head and tattoos on his arms, the mayor of Braddock, a Pittsburgh suburb hammered by industrial decline, doesn’t look like your typical public official. Dubbed America’s coolest mayor, John Fetterman has implemented some of the brightest ideas for urban renewal, as he replaced a moribund steel industry with public art, urban agriculture, craft beer and other hipster fare. Now, Fetterman is competing in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat (currently held by a Republican). If he wins, he’s promised a new Marshall Plan (like the billions invested in Europe after WWII) for America’s forgotten cities. In most election cycles, Fetterman would be written off as an outsider without a chance, but in this unpredictable year, this fresh candidate may just have a shot.
The Resurrection of St. Benedict’s, 60 Minutes
Up until 1967, St. Benedict’s Prep was your run-of-the-mill Catholic boy’s school, serving upper-middle class, white families in Newark, N.J. But when racial tensions exploded into bloody riots that summer, whites fled the city en masse. The school nearly collapsed (it closed for one year), but faculty member Edwin Leahy, then 26, quickly got it back on its feet. It reopened with one big change: students would run the school themselves, keeping each other out of gangs and competing for top marks. Of its 550 students today, nearly all from poor neighborhoods, only two percent don’t finish high school — in a city with a 30 percent dropout rate. Intellect isn’t the major problem in American education, Leahy, a Benedictine monk, argues; it’s all about making students’ realizing their own potential and see “the fact that they are a gift to somebody else.”
Wrongful Conviction Spurs Texas to Reform Police Lineups, Scientist Discovers Efficient Way to Restore Coral Reefs and More
Recognition, The New Yorker
Texas has the reputation of being tough on crime and even harsher on those found guilty. For those who binged Netflix’s recent “Making a Murderer,” the tale of Tim Cole, an Army veteran who, because of incorrect eyewitness identification by the victim herself, was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault in 1986 (and died while incarcerated), will make it seem like our criminal justice system is broken. Fortunately, there is a silver lining to this tragic story.
This Village of Tiny Houses Is Giving Seattle’s Homeless a Place to Live, Fast Co. Exist
With approximately 10,000 people living on the streets, it’s an understatement to say that there’s a homelessness crisis happening in Seattle. Since affordable and free housing for the homeless is a costly endeavor, the nonprofit Low Income Housing Institute needed to get creative. Their idea? Tiny houses that can house a small family, yet cost just $2,000 to construct.
A Coral Reef Revival, The Atlantic
Helping a century’s old coral reef come back to life certainly sounds like science fiction, but it’s exactly what David Vaughan, Ph.D., is doing off the coast of south Florida. He and his team of scientists are restoring reefs by producing thousands of new pieces of coral using microfragmentation — a new process that he developed by accident.