On Big Winds (29 September 2003)

Anybody who knows me well knows that I have a thing about hurricanes. I've had it for a good quarter century, and it has led me to conclude that we Bahamians do hurricanes well.

Either that, or Americans do them badly. I am always amazed at the death tolls and the property damage that hurricanes do in the USA — often the same storms that we have experienced here in the Bahamas, and sometimes even at greater force. And that leads me to my topic today. What is it about us that enables us to weather storms relatively well?

Well, first off, I don’t believe it's because we're God’s modern chosen. I'm not discounting the power of prayer by any means, but for me to believe that would have me believe that the only reason we have been spared is that we're better Christians, and God loves us more than other people. And I'm not prepared to accept that. I don't believe that there were no good praying Christians in the Twin Towers, or that there are no good Christians in Jamaica, Nicaragua or the Carolinas.

Anyway, we aren’t spared the storms. The Bahamas is a big place, after all, and while some islands are less likely to be hit than others, some place in the Bahamas is hit by a hurricane at least once every one to two years. That’s enough to make it routine.

A better reason is our geographical position. Like the East Coast of the USA, we are fairly well positioned to weather those biennial storms for the simple reason that most hurricane systems tend to break up over mountainous terrain. Because we are technically located outside the Caribbean chain, and are set off from the Caribbean Ocean by three large, mountainous islands, many of the hurricanes that hit us are often just big storms with fits of bad temper that come along to spit or blow on us after they have flattened our Caribbean neighbours.

But every now and then — every sixty or seventy years — hurricanes form in the North Atlantic, and those are the ones that we need to be worried about. The major storms that have hit the Bahamas fall into this category — the Great Hurricanes of 1866, 1929 and 1932, as well as the more recent Andrew, Floyd and Michelle. Unlike the more common Caribbean storms, they come out of the North Atlantic, slam into us, and then strike land in the USA. And when they make landfall in the States, they cause unfathomable damage.

Now I’m curious. What is it about the Bahamas that leads us to weather storms more successfully than the Americans? What is it about us that allows us to suffer two Category Four hurricanes in two years with — what? — two fatalities combined and relatively minor structural damage, while Isabel, which had downgraded to a Category Two by the time it struck the US, to make off with 30-40 lives?

One woman, the wife of an American customs official, thinks it’s genetic. As she and her husband prepared to evacuate Nassau in anticipation of Hurricane Isabel, she told a friend of mine: “You people know how to deal with these. We don't.” In other words, it goes with the skin colour, the hair texture, the navel string buried somewhere under a mango tree.

I don’t think it’s that either.

I think it's partly the fact that we don't have mountains or rivers to worry about. Most of the American fatalities in hurricanes are deaths by drowning, which happens when rivers and lakes flood because of high tides and too much rain. Many of the Caribbean and Central American fatalities occur in mountainous places when heavy rains cause mudslides and wash away whole sections of hillsides, including houses and the people in them.

I think it's also partly because we have a healthy respect for acts of God. We know what the Almighty did to Sodom, Gomorrah, the Egyptians, and the whole of Noah's world. Not for us, then, the idiocy of strolling along the beach during the storm to watch the waves or surf the surge. Not for us the reporters swathed in waterproofs, hanging onto telephone poles and headgear while screaming into their microphones: "AUTHORITIES ARE WARNING PEOPLE TO STAY INSIDE. AUTHORITIES HAVE IMPOSED A 12 O'CLOCK CURFEW." We watched Sesame Street. We saw Kermit the Frog standing out in the snow saying "Someone is standing out in the snow." We watched it, and we got the point.

Just take this example. Three of the deaths caused by Hurricane Isabel were from the electrocution of men sent to fix power lines. Now I remember sitting on our front porch in the aftermath of Hurricane Michelle. Our immediate neighbourhood — the people on our street and around the corner a little bit east and a little bit west — was without electricity for nearly two weeks, one of the longest power outages without a good reason, like fallen trees, broken lines, or flooding. Our trouble was a transformer that thought it was a firework. After some time and hundreds of phonecalls, BEC was finally able to spare a truck, and sent some men along to fix it. One of these was a Freeport Power and Light worker, who'd come to Nassau to help with the restoration of power. He rode up in the cherry-picker and began to work on the transformer. He wore two pairs of gloves on his hands, and the top pair was white. One of the guys from BEC asked him what they were for. His answer: because the Americans had trained the Freeport Power and Light workers to work on live lines. The gloves were to protect him from electrocution.

"Man," said the BEC worker from his spot near the truck, "we just turn the power off. Safer that way."

This is not to say that we should not be careful when big winds come our way. Not at all. It is because of our vigilance — our stringent building codes, our willingness to move to hurricane shelters when necessary, our habitual cutting of trees that are near power lines, BEC's policy of turning off the electricity at the power plant before things get really bad — that we have fared so well.

However, a word to the wise. The Bahamas has not been struck by a full-strength Category Five hurricane in many years. And while we do storms well, we also do them late. We like to leave things to the last minute. Too many of us rely on plywood that has to be bought and nailed up to cover our windows, or prefer to stick it out in our houses when we should move to shelters. We do hurricanes well, but we shouldn't let that go to our head.

I'm going to close with a little information about what happened in the perfect storms of 1929. In 1929, the storm surge was so high it washed over Hog (Paradise) Island. Eight people died. In the 1932 Great Abaco Hurricane that hit Abaco, the entire settlement of New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay was wiped outand many died.

So let's not relax just yet; let's take heed from our past, and plan on doing them even better tomorrow.