Hurricane Dorian struck a year ago, highlighting the inequity of climate change | Opinion
This marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Dorian — one of the largest and most destructive hurricanes ever to make landfall in the Atlantic Ocean — as it tore through the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama in the Bahamas. It killed hundreds of people and left more than 14,000 people displaced.
While Dorian’s wind and surge have long since receded, a collective sense of dread continues to linger over the islands this hurricane season. Many residents fear that another storm could destroy their lives yet again before they have had a chance to rebuild. These fears are well-founded, given the challenges that COVID-19 has presented and the recent arrival Hurricane Laura, of one of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the United States.
The challenges facing Bahamians are harbingers for the new reality of climate crisis, where back-to-back disasters overwhelm response efforts, highlight institutionalized inequities and lead to overlapping cycles of disaster recovery.
The Bahamian government was widely criticized for its poor disaster response following Dorian’s departure. Many residents on Abaco and Grand Bahama (total population: 68,000) are still grappling with the challenges of clean up, reconstruction and post-traumatic mental-health issues. These problems have gotten worse with the presence of COVID-19. The pandemic’s arrival has compounded these struggles, as aid workers were jettisoned and tourism— by far the most lucrative industry in the Bahamas — has ground to a halt.
While the hardships endured after Dorian were universal, they weren’t equal. Most notably, Abaco’s Haitian population bore the brunt of these negative effects because of their already-precarious living situations. With no land tenure, extreme unemployment and the ever-present risk of deportation, Haitians were especially vulnerable. Now, without access to adequate aid, much of the community has descended into a dire crisis of mental-health issues, suicide and unemployment. I echo Talmon Joseph Smith’s recent New York Times piece on the 15-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina: Devastating hurricanes continue to highlight how attending to social inequalities and disaster planning would ameliorate post-storm outcomes — yet, these lessons continue to go unlearned.
The Bahamian government only exacerbated these issues by focusing on immigration enforcement after Dorian. Rather than directing resources toward evacuation or food distribution for reeling immigrant communities in the immediate aftermath of the storm, authorities instead used state resources to bulldoze migrant settlements — “shantytowns” — and raid Haitian areas, deporting migrants en masse while dead bodies still lay in the streets.
As an environmental anthropologist who lived on Abaco, I found that most of the island’s residents, including many Bahamians, saw immigration enforcement as a thinly veiled effort to address the island’s controversial “Haitian problem.”
Yet, this isn’t an isolated issue. In countries around the world, America included, we are seeing how the ongoing pandemic and the impacts of climate change highlight not only the precariousness of our existence on this planet, but also the systemic social inequities that lead to greater resilience for some populations over others. In the Bahamas, the second-most economically and socially unequal nation in the Caribbean, this inequality was laid bare in Dorian’s aftermath. Wealth and citizenship status determined who was able to evacuate, survive, return and rebuild.
As a result, residents of Grand Bahama and Abaco relied on international and domestic social networks to begin putting their lives back together. Along with assistance from international relief organizations, neighboring Bahamians and Americans arrived with aid before the Bahamian government did, evacuating survivors while providing food and water. Those less affected by the disaster traveled to nearby communities to buoy reconstruction efforts and clear debris. In the post-pandemic era, many will continue to rely on these networks to import goods, secure employment and rebuild their homes and communities.
As neglected communities turn inward for support, this may signal a new wave of self-governance and mutual aid— a strategy communities will turn to when elected officials fail to address the crises of climate, public health and social inequality that are unraveling in tandem across the planet.
But as million-acre wildfires spread through California and 500-year floods become the new norm, a better, fairer, emergency relief system must be developed — one that ensures that our world’s most vulnerable populations won’t be caught in perpetual cycles of trauma.
Shireen Rahimi is an environmental anthropologist, photographer/filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer.
