A brutal hurricane razed their town. Five years later, they’re still searching for home

Shaquille Joseph knew things were profoundly wrong, irreversibly so, when he heard the bubbling.

The noise had no logical origin. It wasn’t the sound of a tidal wave, roaring towards his house, but a steady fizzing, like a pot of water boiling over in the next room. Moments before, Joseph had been ready to fall asleep in his bedroom. But now he got up and went to the window.

Peering into the grey mist outside, Joseph finally saw it: the Atlantic Ocean was advancing through the dirt roads of the Mudd, a shantytown on the Bahamian island of Great Abaco, and home to thousands of people living in hundreds of makeshift wooden houses.

“The water reached?” Joseph’s uncle called from a different room. “Let’s go. Abandon ship.”

For the next several days, Hurricane Dorian, one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded, raged over the Bahamas. The storm made landfall on 1 September 2019 as a category 5, the highest level of hurricane possible. A 20ft storm surge of floodwater moved swiftly across the Mudd, filling the low-lying coastal settlement like a bathtub. Entire homes and their occupants were swept away, and those who remained were left exposed to a wall of wind that gusted over 220mph (350km/h).

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Joseph eventually abandoned his home and half-swam, half-ran to a nearby church on higher ground. But the water found him there, too; it rose so high in one hallway that Joseph couldn’t stand. For hours, he and a small group of others clung to the windowsills and perched in the rafters of the building as the waves lapped around their necks.

When the sea receded, Joseph’s former town was a wasteland. Stretching into the distance was a flattened, mangled layer of homes and cars and boats. Families huddled together on rooftops. Dead dogs floated through the wreckage. People staggered by with open wounds. Then Joseph heard the first trickle of news: some of his friends and neighbors hadn’t survived.

Across the Bahamas, Dorian’s official death toll stands at 74 people with hundreds still considered missing, although the real number is probably much higher – if not impossible to ever fully quantify. Before Dorian, the exact population size of the Mudd was never known.

Those who did survive lost everything, their community wiped from the map in a matter of hours. The government of the Bahamas quickly banned any rebuilding in the Mudd, bulldozed the ruined remains, and fenced off the area behind barbed wire.

Five years have now passed since Dorian, since Joseph saw the ocean rise up to meet his town. The people who once lived there, a combination of both Haitian immigrants and Bahamian nationals, have all been forced to create new lives elsewhere. Many moved to neighboring islands in the Bahamas, some were deported back to Haiti, and others had no choice but to move to other shantytowns on Abaco.

In the age of global climate crisis, as extremely powerful storms like Dorian threaten to become more common, the story of the Mudd offers a troubling vision of the future – one where those with the fewest resources to start again must contend with increasingly destructive weather, largely on their own. Many people from the Mudd had no safety net. Aside from the aid brought in from international humanitarian groups and the sporadic goodwill of neighbors, they have been left to fend for themselves – pushed from one shantytown to the next.

The years after Dorian have offered little relief for the Caribbean, with a seemingly endless drumbeat of other devastating storms. The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season will hit its peak in September, with the possibility of eight to 13 total hurricanes this year. This season could rank among the busiest on record.

For Joseph, a category 5 hurricane is a cold lesson in impermanence.

“Nothing in life lasts. Nothing in life is forever,” he said. “Not even us.”

From desolation to isolation

Even before Dorian, the Mudd was operating on borrowed time.

Shantytowns first cropped up on Abaco more than 50 years ago, when the owners of large sugar cane plantations, logging operations and citrus farms brought in Haitian immigrants to work seasonal labor jobs. Over the following decades, the Haitian population on the island swelled as other jobs opened up in construction, landscaping and tourism.

The ever-expanding shantytowns, often the most affordable places to live, grew to be hugely controversial. Though local businesses still relied heavily on Haitian labor, government officials tried for years to put an end to shantytowns before Dorian hit, citing health and safety concerns.

Despite the swirling debate, the Mudd gradually became its own universe, with its own history and culture.

On a Facebook page dedicated to the Mudd, Joseph and others shared the stuff of daily life. Photos of friends and weekend farmers’ markets. Links to songs on SoundCloud by aspiring local artists. Deals for homemade pizza and chicken wraps. News about “court church” and “court tournaments” – a whole world of events staged with folding chairs and white tents on the Mudd’s central basketball court.

Today, that world is uninhabited. Beyond the barbed-wire fence that continues to cordon off the Mudd from the rest of the community, thick vegetation has crept over the old streets, the yards, the court. Only the basketball hoop, now bent at a 45-degree angle, can be spotted through the overgrown trees.

The Mudd, when it existed, was a large, visible part of life on Abaco. But in the years since, a portion of the Mudd’s most vulnerable population has been pushed deeper into the shadows. Other shantytowns have sprung up in more remote corners of the sprawling, 90-mile-long island.

One such place is called “the Gaza”.

On a recent afternoon in August, the temperature creeping towards 90F (32C), a local pastor named Breslin Beaubrun made one of his regular trips into the shantytown, where many members of his congregation live. Ten minutes down the highway from the Mudd, Beaubrun pulled his car off to the shoulder of the road and made the rest of the trek on foot. A steady stream of other people – another pastor, a family of five – were making the same journey along a partially flooded dirt road to get to the settlement.

One woman from the Bahamas, Evelyn Pierre-Louis, lives right at the entrance of the Gaza, in a colorful wooden house tucked into the palms. A handful of broken-down cars sat on blocks outside.

Pierre-Louis lost everything she had in the Mudd during Dorian, she said in French-based Haitian Creole, which was translated by Beaubrun. And every person she knew “spread out” after the storm – to the US, to Nassau, to Freeport, to Haiti – “and plenty dead, too”.

There’s a sense of isolation in the new shantytown that the Mudd didn’t have, she said. Out in the countryside of the island, everything feels expensive: the taxi fare to get to the nearest grocery store, the gas to power a small generator, the rent she still pays to live in the shantytown. International aid groups sometimes used to bring food, water and clothes. “Then, after a while, that stopped,” she said.

Several houses down from Pierre-Louis, a 39-year-old man from Haiti, who asked not to be named out of security concerns, has struggled to find work after Dorian. A one-year work permit in the Bahamas costs at least several hundred dollars; even when he finds a temporary job in landscaping or construction, the project ends after a month or two.

But in the Gaza, the biggest collective fear is the prospect of ending up back on the street. After a lengthy legal battle, the government issued hundreds of eviction notices in Abaco’s shantytowns earlier this year and has started to demolish homes. A section of the Gaza has already been destroyed.

“If they break down the houses,” the 39-year-old from Haiti said, “we don’t know what to do.”

‘Nowhere else to go’

Near the Gaza, on a quiet plot of land behind a church, another set of Dorian survivors has been living in a tidy row of one-room emergency shelters for nearly five years. The miniature houses, donated by an aid group shortly after the storm, have proved to be just as critical in 2024 as they were in 2019.

Henry Canton, the church’s pastor, has been caring for Dorian refugees the entire time. Before the emergency shelters were brought in, roughly 50 people lived in tents behind his church building. Now the group is smaller and there’s a system in place for most of their basic needs: communal toilets are set up outside, and Canton runs a power cord from the church to make sure the shelters have some electricity. Many of the units also have small refrigerators and portable stovetops.

“Nobody,” Canton said, standing in his church yard in the stifling afternoon heat, “wants to start all over in life.” As he spoke, a few of the church’s residents came up to greet him. Most simply call him “pas” – short for pastor.

Marie-Selle François, a 62-year-old woman from Haiti, is one of the people who had to start all over.

Hours before Dorian hit, François remembers government officials driving through the Mudd with a megaphone, urging people to leave. François fled to a nearby church that was being used as an informal hurricane shelter, she said in Creole as Canton translated.

When she saw the storm surge rising up over the island, she knew one thing: “Well, the Mudd is finished.” François never got the chance to return to her old home or to salvage any of her possessions.

Today, François shares one of the boxy emergency shelters with her daughter and one other person. For pocket change, she sells homemade peanut cake and other baked goods to members of the church’s congregation. But any time it starts to rain heavily or the wind blows, she inevitably thinks about Dorian; her new home wouldn’t be able to withstand another major hurricane. The official hurricane shelter on the island, a project that has been in the works for years, hasn’t been finished yet.

François never thought she would spend half a decade living in an temporary emergency shelter. But the escalating gang violence in her home country of Haiti, she said, makes it impossible to return.

“I don’t have nowhere else to go,” she said, sitting outside her shelter, her hands clasped in her lap.

‘Onward, together’

Meanwhile, the capital of the Bahamas – Nassau – can feel worlds away from Abaco.

At popular Junkanoo beach, tourists from five different cruise ships flooded on to the sand on a recent Thursday morning, searching for the best beach chairs and heading to a string of outdoor bars for daiquiris and rum punches. Vendors roamed the beach, hawking umbrella rentals and boxes of cigars.

Shaquille Joseph had his own wares to sell at Junkanoo that day: freshly made watermelon and mango juice. He wheeled a little blue cooler up and down the beachfront, a bundle of straws sticking out of his shirt pocket.

Joseph, like thousands of others, evacuated from Abaco to Nassau in September 2019. He’s 32 years old now, and has had time to process what he saw and to make plans for the future: eventually, he hopes to get an official business license to sell his juices, or he might start making new products, like handmade soaps, with his wife.

Joseph practiced Islam before Dorian, but the storm drew him even closer to his faith and to the tight-knit Muslim community in Nassau. He goes by the name Ibrahim now more often than Shaquille. When the storm, and the idea of mortality, comes up in conversations, Joseph thinks about it through the lens of religion.

“Things would happen during that time that would have been difficult to deal with if I didn’t know this knowledge,” he said, throngs of tourists moving past him at Junkanoo. “Everything happens for a purpose beyond what our knowledge is.”

Back on Abaco, towards the deep center of the island, there’s a hushed place devoid of people. From this spot, even the ocean isn’t visible on the horizon.

Here, 55 unnamed people are buried in a mass grave. Each tomb is marked only by a series of letters and numbers, starting with “AB001”, which stands for someone who died on Abaco. Before they were brought to this public cemetery, the bodies were stored in a refrigerated trailer for nine months.

“In loving memory of the victims of Hurricane Dorian,” a plaque says at the entrance. “May their souls rest in peace.”

The sidewalk is badly cracked and high weeds poke up around the graves. Except for one named man, there’s almost no personal information about any of the victims’ lives or deaths. One frayed wreath offers a sole message, typed on a waterlogged piece of paper at the center. It’s the national motto of the Bahamas.

“Forward, upward,” it reads. “Onward, together.”