A blind man carried his disabled adult son to safety as Hurricane Dorian tore apart his home in the Bahamas.
Eight people were taking refuge in Brent Lowe’s cement home in the Abaco Islands on Sunday when Dorian made landfall, boasting maximum sustained winds of 185 mph and wind gusts up to 220 mph.
As conditions worsened, the group moved to a bathroom and Lowe’s son curled up in a bathtub, Lowe told the New York Times.
The situation got dire when the roof tore off and the group decided to take a chance and wade through rough current to the closest home still standing.
Lowe, 49, put his 24-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and is unable to walk, onto his shoulders and, while holding his neighbor’s hand, felt his way to shelter five minutes away.
“It was scary, so scary,” Lowe said.
Lowe and his son stayed at the neighbor’s house for a day until a rescue bus picked them up and took to a shelter. Lowe, who worked as a butcher in a fish house until he lost his vision because of diabetes, was evacuated to Nassau on Tuesday night, where he can get the dialysis treatment he requires. He left his son with his sister-in-law in Abaco.
Although the storm has since moved on to the East Coast, Lowe has been unable to find out if his eldest daughter is safe, because of communications getting disrupted by Dorian.
“Right before we had the wind, I spoke with her,” Lowe said. “I wish I could have been able to call and ask somebody, you know, because I really was worried about them. I was worried about everybody.”
As many as 30 people have been reported dead in the Bahamas because of Dorian, and the number is expected to rise. Harrowing stories have begun to emerge, including one from a fisherman named Howard Armstrong, who told CNN that he witnessed his wife drown when storm surge flooded their house.
Even though his home is destroyed, like so many others on some of the northern islands of the Bahamas, Lowe said he wants to remain living in Abaco.
“That’s where my family is. My kids are there, my brothers, my sisters, they’re all there,” he said, adding that he is “just wondering where we’re going to live when I go back home, what I’m going to do.”
