This Tiny Seaside City on Grand Bahama Island Was Destroyed by a Hurricane — Here is What It is Like 4 Years Later

Darkness crept over little McLean’s City. 

The winds howled, extra powerfully than anybody may think about. After which, in some way, obtained even stronger. 

Waves of water, a large sea surge, started dashing towards the defenseless two-street seaside village positioned on the far japanese finish of Grand Bahama Island. 

Hurricane Dorian had discovered its most susceptible sufferer.

Close to the peak of the storm, Remelda Thomas, her husband, Phil, and their two youngest youngsters, Dillard and Ebony, had been all squeezed right into a closet of their one-story residence. It was the one place they felt any sense of shelter from the surging sea and 200 mph gusts. That they had made it via hurricanes earlier than. It appeared potential to make it via this one, too.

The water quickly obtained too excessive within the closet, so the foursome climbed midway up a ladder that led to the attic. Their roof had principally been ripped off its underpinnings, in order that they couldn’t go all the way in which up. And so they couldn’t return down with water dashing in beneath. They had been trapped.

So Mel and her household stayed as Dorian tossed automobiles into the close by bay and drowned native vegetation so utterly that, 4 years later, it nonetheless hasn’t come again.

The city church was destroyed. The varsity was torn aside. The water stage reached 19 ft in some locations.

It wasn’t till greater than 48 hours later, as soon as Dorian had lastly moved on, that the Thomas household exited what was left of their home. The road, and their city, had been unrecognizable. However that they had survived. 

Mel’s first-born son, P.J., and his household, on the different finish of McLean’s City, weren’t so fortunate. Their home was ripped off its basis, leaving simply tile flooring as a reminder that there had as soon as been a house there. P.J.’s spouse, Baronette, survived, whereas P.J., 31, Mateo Bethel, 15, Phillip III, 8, and Remeille Thomas, 6, disappeared into the ocean. They had been 4 of the 5 individuals killed by Dorian in McLean’s City.

“We don’t know what life is gonna throw at us,” Mel advised me, as I rode along with her to McLean’s City earlier this yr. “You simply don’t know. However when it comes, it’s a must to deal with it one of the simplest ways you’ll be able to.”