Front Burner - After the storm: two portraits of hurricane recovery

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

This week, Hurricane Dorian delivered catastrophic damage to the Bahamas. It was a Category 5 storm when it hit the island nation, with winds of up to 295 km/hr, and Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said it left "generational devastation." Today on Front Burner, in the age of intensifying storms, two very different portraits of hurricane recovery. Janise Elie of the Guardian describes the devastation of the Caribbean Island of Dominica by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Then, Rice University assistant professor Max Besbris talks about how Houston, Texas rebuilt after Hurricane Harvey that same year.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. This week, a hurricane battered the Bahamas, stalling over the Caribbean islands for days. We are in the midst of a historic tragedy.

What happened to it? Oh my God, everything is ruined. My island of Abaco is finished. Everything is gone, just bodies. As I record this, the storm is headed towards South Carolina, then Canada's east coast. Dorian is the latest example in a worrying trend involving climate change and intensifying hurricane seasons, some of them in vulnerable corners of the world. Today, two different portraits of hurricane recovery after storms in 2017. Houston and Dominica in the Caribbean. And the one thing that they have in common.

This is FrontBurner. Two years ago, the small Caribbean island of Dominica was hit by a Category 5 storm called Maria. Maria lashing out with winds of nearly 160 miles per hour. This used to be a church, the Baptist church. One piece of a wall remaining. I lost my nieces, my brothers in Martinique, critical conditions. I love this country. I lost my nieces, my brothers in Martinique, critical conditions. I love this country.

I, you know, it's devastating for me. Janice Eli is a reporter with The Guardian. Her parents are from Dominica. And three months after the storm passed, she went to survey the damage and was shocked by what she saw. and was shocked by what she saw. Dominica was known for its lush vegetation. It has 365 rivers, beautiful waterfalls, and the landscape is second to none.

When I got there, trees were flattened. Where mangoes, bananas and limes grew in abundance, all that remained was a barren landscape, almost like a moonscape. There was nothing there. This is what's left of the main road. Morning. Morning.

You okay? My mother's school in Sofia, in the southwest of the country, which was hard as hit, was completely flattened. The church where she had made her Holy Communion was destroyed by the storm, and graves in the cemetery where my father was buried were battered and broken. I was totally devastated and shocked by what I saw.

I understand something like 95% of the buildings on the island were destroyed, right? Apparently 95% of the buildings were destroyed, mainly damage to the roof. And even the Prime Minister wasn't spared, his roof was torn off in the storm. I joke with my people, when they meet me on the streets and they say, Prime Minister, my house is gone, I'm homeless. I say to you, darling, I am also homeless, as the Prime Minister of the country. Approximately 65 people died and 50,000 people were displaced by the storm in a population of about 73,000.

Wow. There was a complete communication blackout. And for a long time, I didn't even know whether my family were alive or dead, to be honest. It was a terrifying time. The country was almost obliterated. I'm so sorry that you had to go through all of that. When you were able to talk to your family, what did they tell you about what it was like to live through that storm? Well, they said the storm was absolutely terrifying.

They knew something was coming, but they had thought they had escaped the worst of the storms of that season. Hurricane Irma had hit earlier and wasn't quite as devastating and so they thought they were in the clear but before long they realised that there was something terrible happening and roofs were torn off, windows were blown in. My family just said that everything went black and they could hear this howling, almost like some sort of monster was descending on them. And it was absolutely terrifying. Like it was just absolutely crazy. Like I saw death that night. It's terrifying. It's scary

to even close your eyes because you don't know what's going to happen. You're still thinking that it's going to happen. And when you close your eyes, you hear the howling of the winds. It sounded like a pack of wolves. If an island is essentially 95% destroyed, what does rebuilding even look like when you're starting from nothing? What did the people of Dominica do in the aftermath of the hurricane? In terms of rebuilding, you're starting with nothing. There was no running water. There was, as I said, a communication blackout. They were totally dependent on help from outside

sources, from neighboring islands, who Dominica has often helped helped from the UN, from the World Bank and former colonial powers also which has its own unique problems and awkwardness. So there was help but it was a bit slow in coming in partly because of the nature of the damage to the country. There was no flights could come in for a while. It was difficult to come in by sea also. With both airports shut down, people crowd the gates at the port to try to get on one of the few ships evacuating people out. And when you say slow, you know, what do you mean by that? What does Dominica look like now, two years on? Dominica is a resilient country.

The country is full of resilient people. Qatar is a resilient country, a country full of resilient people. And so it looks very different to how it did when the hurricane hit. Lots of schools have reopened. The hospital is back up and running. But there are still pockets of areas, especially areas that were hardest hit, which are on the coast. You can still see the aftermath of the storm. There is still some structural damage, but people haven't really had the resources to repair.

And there's a kind of heaviness in the demeanor of the people. I think the trauma has had a big impact, and that's something that's often overlooked when there are storms of this nature. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Well, there are people that I've spoken to in my family who had insomnia for a while, some were quite depressed. There were children who had lost classmates, literally lost in that their homes were swept in the sea and these people were never seen again.

And that leaves a heavy mark on a people. I would also imagine, you mentioned that there had been some successes and some brick and mortar rebuilding on the island, but there would also be a heavy hit to Dominica's economy. How was that affected in the aftermath of the storm? Entire crops were destroyed, agriculture, tourism, the transport sectors were disabled by the storm. And so it's had a devastating impact on the people and their ability to rebuild.

Minister for Foreign Affairs and CARICOM Affairs of Dominica. International experts disclosed that a single hurricane in a few hours caused loss and damage equivalent to 226% of our country's GDP. The cost of building back better comes with a price tag far in excess of what small developing states like Dominica are able to meet single-handedly. I am wondering, you know, you mentioned to me that Dominica did get some help from neighboring islands and, you know, other sources. In response to this hurricane, an official from the island of St. Lucia essentially said that Caribbean countries like his and like Dominica are left on their own after a disaster. When a state in the United States is affected, there are another 49 states which respond immediately because they are on the same continent.

We don't have that luxury in St. Lucia. In fact, we are separated from all of the other islands. Do you think that that's true or that there's some truth in that? I wouldn't say they were left on their own. There has been help, but the help hasn't come easily. It seems that there is a reluctance from former colonial powers to do enough. I think there is a sense in Dominica that more could have been done to help and with a bit more immediacy. I think there is an uneasy legacy from the transatlantic slave trade and just the colonial influence. Dominicans are resilient, but most of them are descendants of enslaved Africans.

And so poverty remains rife on the island, partly through that reason. And there has been no reparation to the slave trade, which went on for centuries. And it's what Britain's wealth has been largely built on. It strikes me that when you live in a place where events like hurricanes are almost an inevitability, the idea that this will happen again, whether or not there is an infrastructure to protect people from it, you know, how do people continue to cope with that? Well, I've noticed that people tend to live just for the day. Part of the problem is that due to widespread poverty, a majority of people cannot adequately storm-proof their homes.

Many properties are made from aluminium or wood, and so it's a precarious existence. Many people push concerns about upcoming hurricanes to the back of their minds because of this. And even in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the infrastructure that was built back up again, was it the same kind of infrastructure that was built before the hurricane, these aluminum homes that you're talking about? As in many places, there is a divide between the rich and poor and what they can afford.

And so, for example, many of my family are involved in politics and education and the legal system on the island. They're quite wealthy and they can afford luxury homes that are more resilient to storm damage. But I also have members of my family, mainly on my mother's side, that unfortunately are less fortunate and cannot bear the brunt of natural disasters. There is an awareness by the government that homes need to be more climate resilient as storms generally have become more deadly and just more wild over the years. But there isn't really the funds to do that, and that's a problem. Ireland's states on the front line are being asked to take out additional insurance against losses and damage, which are the direct results of a change in climate caused by others.

This is asking the victim to pay by installment. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong here, that as these storms are going to continue, the countries on the front lines of them are in some ways the least equipped to recover from them. They are also maybe the least responsible for them. Like, I doubt Dominica's carbon emissions are very high. Well, exactly. And it's a terrible problem and it's seen in many developing countries. And to quote the Dominican prime minister, he said that Dominicans, they are casualties in the war against climate change. And they're on the front line of this war, but they didn't

create it. While the big countries talk, the small island nations suffer. We in the Caribbean do not produce greenhouse gases or sulfate aerosols. We have made no contribution to global warming. That can move the needle. But yet, we are among the main victims on the front line. I believe they are on the front line, and it's a terrifying prospect. Janice, thank you so much for being here with us today. You're welcome. Thank you. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Now to Houston, Texas, a city hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, a storm now tied with Katrina as the costliest in American history. As of today, this storm in Houston has produced the single largest rainfall amount that has ever been recorded in the continental United States. This is the Buffalo Bayou, but you can't tell where the bayou ends and the downtown starts. The current was getting hot. We had to bust a window to get out.

This is the first time we've even seen how much water it has been, so it's crazy. it has been. So it's crazy. We'll talk to Max Bespris, a professor at Houston's Rice University who has spent the last two years studying the way the city responded to the storm. Hi, Max. Hi. So I understand you got to Houston three weeks before Harvey hit, right? Where were you when it hit? That's right. I was in my brand new apartment. I had just started my job as an assistant professor of sociology here at Rice. And I live in a high rise, which is not super common in the cityscape of Houston. And so I had an unobstructed view to a big part of the city and these four or five days of just nonstop rain. Did it feel to you at the time that the city was adequately prepared for the storm?

No, I think having not lived here very long, it really didn't seem that the city in general was able to respond in a just or equitable way or even really just be prepared for something of that magnitude. Officials begging residents to stay strong. I know what you're going through. I know you're scared. I know you're panicked. I know you feel like in a desperation right now, but know that help is coming. Help will be there and we will help bring all of this back. In the few days after the storm, the amount of people who were needing shelter in places like the convention center and energy stadium was massive. Harvey evacuees are streaming into the city's convention center. Officials had

originally planned to house just 5,000 people there. They are well past 10,000 people. Honestly, they've just lost track. You've lost everything. Yes. And the clothes you're wearing came from donations. Yes, ma'am. Material, we'll get it back eventually, you know, but you can't get back your life. And the scope of it was really, really intense in the few days after the storm hit. Can you paint a picture for me of what that scope looked like? I think there's a few ways to sort of imagine how intense it was. One is that there's obviously numbers like tens of thousands of homes destroyed, hundreds of thousands of buildings more broadly, tens of thousands of vehicles underwater. But getting there personally to the convention center, which I did on the

fourth day of the storm, and having, I think, people trying their best, both Red Cross employees, but then also the city in general, trying to coordinate everything that was going on, even with all the sort of goodwill and I think effort that was going into it. People had no idea who were showing up from these flooded properties about where they could go, where they were going to stay for the next few days, let alone weeks, right, or months. It's just been very stressful not knowing what's going to happen next. Where are we going to go? I know I can't return back home because there isn't anything to return to.

My car got flooded out. The house is flooded out. I don't know what to do next, really. So I'm just basically at a standstill. And it wasn't really until weeks after the storm that I think FEMA really hit the ground and started giving people options about what to do. Right. We're talking flooded areas, huge power outages. It was hard for people to get information. Yeah, the communication systems in general were weak at best. And most people, I think, who had to be rescued or ones who evacuated themselves from their flooded properties were often confused about where to go and what to do. And I know for Texas, at least 80 people died.

That's right. So in some ways, what people were touting as a lower number compared to storms like Katrina. And part of that is that there was very little wind this far inland with Hurricane Harvey. It was mostly flood. But that's obviously still a devastating number. And the number of people that die in any of these kinds of events, obviously, is something that I think can be reduced and that all efforts should be made to be reduced. Do you have a sense of how deeply this affected Houston's economy? So I'm thinking about the oil and gas sector here. Interestingly, at least in terms of employment, Houston was not hit that hard. The economy in this region was on an upswing before the storm. There's obviously a dip in a couple different indices, including employment. But in the months afterward, there's a pretty robust recovery. Now, obviously, that masks a lot of heterogeneity within different kinds of communities. But

if you're looking at it from a broad picture, the Houston economy continued to do very well, buoyed in general by a still very robust natural gas market across the globe. And when we're talking about a recovery, you know, what kind of things were done in the weeks and months after the hurricane? So FEMA came and set up regional branches throughout the metro area that were sort of go-to points for folks who had flooded and were able to get resources about information, filling out paperwork, getting loans from the Small Business Administration, which administers loans in the aftermath of disasters here in the United States. And I think those were, by and large, pretty effective in some ways.

I think in others, this issue of communication is still a really big one, even in the months afterward. And recovery was very uneven. You had communities that are pretty well off that I would say within three to six months looked pretty good, in good shape. And certainly six months afterward, it would have looked like if you had driven through and never been there before that almost nothing had ever happened. But once you start to go inside people's properties, I think there's a lot of difference because some people had the funds and insurance to be able to pay for repairs, and a lot of people didn't. And I think there are still folks even two years out who are living in properties that are still unfinished from the damage that was caused by Hurricane Harvey. I know you've spent a lot of time watching how one neighborhood rebounded, a largely white middle class area on a creek. And what struck you the most about their situation?

I think the most interesting thing is the differences across households, even in one neighborhood. Now this from the surface looks like a very homogenous place. A lot of middle class folks who are mostly white, but because some of them had flood insurance and some of them did not, they were getting vastly different amounts of money in the aftermath of the storm. And in this one neighborhood where I've been doing research, there are still folks who don't have drywall up two years after the storm, just because they were older on fixed incomes. And while they were own their homes and had sort of attained middle class lifestyles in some ways, you know, they don't have the kind of cash reserves necessary for rebuilding. I would imagine and correct me if I'm wrong, but that that would

get worse as you move into lower income neighborhoods too, right? I think that's right. One thing we know from decades of research on natural disasters and certainly work here in Houston from Hurricane Harvey as well is that disadvantaged places are always more vulnerable to natural disasters, both in terms of their effects, but then also the inequality that persists in the long term afterward. also the inequality that persists in the long term afterward. And recent research by my colleague, Jim Elliott, here at Rice, and Junya Howell, who's at the University of Pittsburgh, has shown that areas that get FEMA funding actually see increases in income inequality in the years after, meaning that natural disasters actually make more inequality. Folks who are more disadvantaged become even more so by the fact

of being hit by a hurricane. You know, a takeaway for me from this conversation with you, but also the conversation with Janice about Dominica, is that certainly storms don't discriminate, they hit everybody, but recoveries do. And I suppose you can take this down the line that in Houston, poorer people were adversely affected. But then when you are in a poorer country like Dominica, you're facing even greater hurdles. I think that's exactly right, is that everyone talked about Harvey as being a storm that didn't discriminate. And that is largely true. Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Houston sit on these really beautiful bayous and creeks, and they flooded really badly. But in the aftermath of the storm, it's really where you start to see inequality emerge really intensely. And that's largely true, I think, across neighborhoods, it's true across regions and it's true across countries as well.

And so when places like Dominica or Puerto Rico get hit really hard by natural disasters and climate-related disasters, they're obviously already starting at a disadvantage. And these inequalities between places are only going to get greater as these disasters become more intense. Max, thank you so much. My pleasure. As we mentioned at the top of the show, Hurricane Dorian has taken a catastrophic toll on the Bahamas. At the time that we recorded this on Thursday afternoon, at least 20 people were confirmed dead. We're learning of a Canadian who was killed in the storm in the Bahamas. Alicia Lioli was 27 years old, originally from southwestern Ontario. We do know the rest of her family, her husband and children, including a toddler, are safe.

Front Burner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Shannon Higgins, Imogen Burchard, Matt Alma, Chris Berube, and Elaine Chao. Special thanks this week to Ellen Payne-Smith, Charlie Cho, and the Early Edition team in Vancouver. We owe you guys. Derek Vanderwyk is our sound designer and technician. Our music is by Joseph Chabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening, And see you guys on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.