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: natural disaster
In the Wake of Hurricane Michael, the Cajun Navy is Saving Lives
While Hurricane Michael was still swirling in the Gulf, hours yet from devastating the Florida panhandle, the Cajun Navy was already waiting for it. They had boats, trucks, chainsaws and other rescue gear with them, and were helping people evacuate as the storm unexpectedly and swiftly morphed into a monster.
The Cajun Navy is a grassroots response to professional rescue organizations like the National Guard and FEMA. They help fill in the gaps, especially when the professionals are overwhelmed by calls from people in need.
The Cajun Navy first set sail in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans 13 years ago. Nearly 400 volunteers drove their boats through the flooded city, rescuing over 10,000 people from rooftops and buildings.
https://www.facebook.com/CNNReplay/videos/2222103264469514/
Since then, the Navy has reappeared during other natural disasters in the Southeast, mostly when federal response has fallen short. Over the past few years, they’ve added many more members and have become a more organized group. They’ve responded to hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Florence and now Michael. And they are out right there, as of press time, paddling through an unrecognizable landscape, sifting through debris, saving lives one by one.
People in distress can request help through the Cajun Navy’s Facebook page and through sites like CrowdSource Rescue, which was created in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Navy also leverages the power of social media to crowdsource help when they need it: A senior citizens’ home needed a backup generator installed, and within 3 hours, this post asking for help had more than 200 shares and a dozen comments. According to the Sarasota Herald, the Navy received more than 3,000 requests for help within the first 24 hours of the storm.
https://www.facebook.com/UNITEDCAJUNNAVY/posts/2285356931485077
As we begin to assess the full toll of Hurricane Michael, the Cajun Navy will be there, alongside other rescue workers, no matter the risk or how blurry the legal line is. (They’re a citizen team of “neighbors helping neighbors” as opposed to legally recognized first responders, which means they don’t usually meet the legal requirements for entering a disaster area.)
But as Cajun Navy president John Billiot told CNN, “If me rescuing people, and saving people’s lives [means] I get arrested, I said that’s no problem. America will have my back.”
How One Man and His School Bus Are Saving Animals From Hurricanes
From the outside, it looks like a normal school bus. But inside, it’s a bustling animal shelter on wheels, with rows of dogs and cats in crates stacked two deep.
Tony Alsup spent this past week driving his bus to South Carolina shelters to rescue animals in the path of Hurricane Florence, which has caused 23 deaths and displaced more than 1 million residents as of publishing. So far Alsup has gathered 53 dogs and 11 cats and relocated them to shelters out of harm’s way.
“I’m like, look, these are lives too,” Alsup told the Washington Post. “Animals — especially shelter pets — they always have to take the back seat of the bus. But I’ll give them their own bus. If I have to I’ll pay for all the fuel, or even a boat, to get these dogs out of there.”
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Alsup never planned on becoming a chauffeur for dozens of animals in need. It all started with a misunderstanding on social media: When Hurricane Harvey was barreling toward Houston in 2017, Alsup saw a web post requesting help in bringing shelter animals to safety. Alsup volunteered, planning to carry a few dogs in the cab of his semi-truck. Meanwhile, the shelters assumed he could transfer dozens of animals in the body of the truck.
“You’ve got to be very careful what you say on social media, man,” he told the Greenville News.
But once he had given his word, Alsup felt he couldn’t back out. “So,” he reasoned, “why don’t I just go buy a bus?”
He spent $3,200 on a former school bus, tore the seats out to make room for dog crates, and hit the road. Since then, Alsup has been an essential force in helping rescue pets displaced by Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and now Florence.
Alsup has largely focused on the “leftover” animals — “the dogs with blocky heads, the ones with heartworm,” wrote one shelter on its Facebook page. “The ones no one else will ever take.”
“It’s so easy for people to adopt the small pets and the cuties and the cuddly,” Alsup said. “We take on the ones that deserve a chance even though they are big and a little ugly. But I love big dogs, and we find places for them.”
If you’d like to contribute to Alsup’s animal rescue efforts, you can donate via PayPal.
How a Tornado-Stricken Town Became a Model of American Sustainability
Imagine that one day your town exists. Then, the next day, it doesn’t. That was the terrifying reality for residents of a small town located on the great plains of Kansas.
In May 2007, a devastating category EF5 tornado effectively destroyed Greensberg, Kansas. The storm flattened about 95 percent of the town’s homes and businesses and left 11 people dead and more than 60 injured. Like many communities devastated by natural disasters, Greensberg residents were determined to rebuild. But instead of just recreating the rural farm town that existed just days prior, they decided instead to look toward the future. In the process, this small rural farm town of around 777 people has become a model of sustainability.
MORE: Meet John Fease. He’s Rebuilding a Downtrodden Texas Town, One House at a Time
At the first meeting after disaster struck, town-resident-turned-community-organizer Daniel Wallach proposed rebuilding the town as a “model green community,” according to USA Today. Then-mayor Lonnie McCollum and then-governor Kathleen Sebelius (current U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services) agreed, and before long most of the town’s citizens were on board. Eight short months after the tornado leveled the town, the Greensburg City Council adopted a resolution stating that all large public buildings must meet LEED-platinum standards and utilize renewable energy sources. Everything from the new City Hall to the Kiowa Memorial Hospital to the local John Deere dealership were redesigned and built as the sustainable ideal. But that was just the beginning.
The wind that always blows through Greensburg now powers the town, as turbines can be found on farms, in residential neighborhoods and throughout the business community — even at the aforementioned John Deere dealership. Also, a large wind farm sits just outside of town. Inspiringly, the town creates more than enough energy to power the community, and as such, sells its surplus back to the grid. The streetlamps that line the streets are all LED—reducing energy costs even more. And local businesses have thought up innovative ways to be even more sustainable — from Centerea Bank, which absorbs stormwater with its own bioswale (a landscape element) to the John Deere dealership, which stores waste oil to heat the business in the winter.
Greensburg is not only a model for sustainability, but it also serves as a resource,too: Officials consult with other towns that have been ravaged by disaster to help them consider greener ways to rebuild, as well as cities that are just looking for a more sustainable future.
In this situation, Greensburg discovered that the grass really is greener on the other side.
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