Active Program

Disaster Profile: The Bahamas Hurricane Dorian

On September 1, 2019, Hurricane Dorian made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in The Bahamas with wind speeds in excess of 185mph, lashing The Bahamian islands of Great Abaco (pop. ~17,200) and Grand Bahama (pop. ~51,000). After striking The Bahamas, Dorian’s travelling speed slowed to 1 mph over Grand Bahama, prolonging the island’s exposure to life-threatening storm surges of 18-23 feet above normal tide levels. Dorian is the strongest hurricane on record for The Bahamas and has tied a record for the strongest Atlantic hurricane to make landfall.

Program Work: Response and Recovery Activities

With immense support from our local and global partners, we’re committed to performing continuous work for the next two years, with an immediate focus on response capacity in some of the hardest-hit areas. Our long-term recovery program will target reconstruction in schools and critical community infrastructure (e.g. health clinics, libraries, homes, etc)

Our teams are working tirelessly to get schools back up and running in Marsh Harbour. We have performed work on seven schools, including Every Child counts, St. Francis de Sales and Central Abaco Primary School (the biggest public school on the island). Our work on schools will continue as there is still a huge need for this scope of work.

Alongside our work in schools, we also have a queue of more than 120 homes we will be working on. We are largely working on roofs, mucking and gutting, debris removal and mold sanitation. We have expanded our work in homes extensively in the last couple of months and have added other community-based facilities, like a library and clinics, to our queue.

A special thank you to our long-term partner, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, and generous supporters for helping us reach the $4M match goal. While this is incredible, we have found the scope and scale of the devastation to be even more extreme than first estimated. This leads us to estimate we’ll need a minimum of $7M for the recovery work over the next two years. We appreciate your continued support to assist The Bahamas on the long road to recovery.

Join us on program today.