Hurricane Dorian Was a Climate Injustice

(The New Yorker) It looked like the trees had risen out of an angry ocean. It looked like a man was standing on a ship that had wandered into a storm. But the man was not on a ship; the man was on land, and the ocean was at his front door. The water was many feet deep and covered the road that led to his home. All one could see straight out to the horizon was ocean.

When Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas, there were many videos like this one circulating on my family’s group chat in WhatsApp. I sat in a park in Brooklyn on a calm day, a few clouds in the sky, and swiped through them all. I had relatives on ; I grew up on New Providence. One video was taken by a family forced to climb into their attic as the water crashed against the concrete of their house. Another showed the view from a second floor, looking down at the Atlantic, which had risen to claim the first floor of a home, with furniture flung around like useless playthings.

In the park, women were pumping their fists to the rhythm of soca music and pulling their knees up to their stomachs. Families were out having picnics; fruits and churros abounded. While briefly glancing up from my iPhone, I caught the eyes of a small boy. He was looking at me with his eyebrows tight and shook his head as if he were disappointed, as if he knew that I had a hurricane on the brain. I sat in the park and stared out into the distance, past the harbor and into the Atlantic, toward the Bahamas, where Dorian was wreaking its havoc. Dorian had opened its one good and terrible eye over my country and for almost two days it refused to budge. There were people trapped in their homes, people trapped in their attics, and people trapped outside in the storm itself, in search of safety after their roofs had come clean off.

Read more at: The New Yorker

Source: CARICOM TODAY