Blind father carries disabled son to safety as their house is destroyed by Hurricane Dorian

The roof had blown clean off. Outside, the ocean surged, swallowing the land.

Brent Lowe knew he had to escape — and take his 24-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and cannot walk, with him.

But he had another problem: he is blind.

Mr Lowe put his grown son on his shoulders, then stepped off his porch. The swirling current outside came up to his chin.

“It was scary, so scary,” he said.

Clutching neighbours, he said he felt his way to the closest home still standing. It was five minutes — an eternity — away.

Stories of unlikely survival have slowly emerged in the days since Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, pummelling the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco for days before moving towards the Atlantic Seaboard.

While the damage has been visible from above, the full human toll is still far from certain, with 30 deaths confirmed so far and authorities warning that the real number may be much higher.

The death count “could be staggering,” Dr Duane Sands, the minister of health, who updated the toll late Thursday.

Some neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble, almost entirely flattened by the storm. In others, 95 per cent of homes have been damaged or destroyed.

Thousands of people are now homeless, taking refuge in gyms or churches, and authorities are bracing for an influx of bodies as the extent of the destruction becomes clear.

When Hurricane Dorian first made landfall on Sunday, Mr Lowe recalled, all of its fury seemed to bear down on him.

The storm raging outside was one of the most powerful ever to sweep through the Atlantic. Its eye was approaching, and the group of eight people inside Mr Lowe’s cement house were particularly vulnerable.

In addition to Lowe and his disabled son, neighbours whose homes had already been destroyed were also sheltering there. Among them were two children.

As the storm howled around them, he said the roof began to lift off, then slap back down.

Abaco withstood sustained winds of up to 185mph that day, with gusts that reached 220mph.

The group sought safety in the bathroom, where they huddled together and prayed, hoping for relief. Mr Lowe’s son was nestled inside the bathtub.

That is when the roof flew away.

Exposed to the elements, each person had to step out into the storm. They clung to each other and set out to find refuge.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life,” said M Lowe, who is no stranger to hurricanes but said he could never have imagined the terror of that day.

The group reached a neighbour's house. Mr Lowe and his son hunkered down there for a day until a rescue bus was able to pick them up on Monday and take them to a shelter.

On Tuesday night, he was evacuated to Nassau, where he can get the dialysis treatment he needs three times a week. His son had to stay in Abaco, in the care of Mr Lowe’s sister-in-law.

“I came here with the clothes that I had on from Saturday,” he said.

Although the father and son are now safe, his ordeal is, in some ways, only beginning.

He did not know if his eldest daughter made it through the storm. The phone lines have been down for days and communication with Abaco is very difficult.

“Right before we had the wind, I spoke with her,” he 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.”

So many people have been pushed from their homes by the hurricane that in Marsh Harbour, the main town on Abaco, as many as 2,000 people were seeking shelter in a clinic and a government complex. Officials warned that tent cities might have to be set up to accommodate the many survivors.

Bahamian officials urged their citizens to be unified.

“There are no words to convey the grief we feel for our fellow Bahamians in the Abacos and Grand Bahama,” Dionisio D’Aguilar, the tourism and aviation minister, said in a statement. “Now is the time to come together for our brothers and sisters in need, and help our country get back on its feet.”

Like many of his neighbours, Mr Lowe is now homeless. After a lifetime on the outskirts of Marsh Harbour — where he raised a family and worked as a butcher in a fish house until he lost his eyesight to diabetes — his home, his community and everything he built has been obliterated.

Still, he wants to return to Abaco.

“I have to go,” he said. “That’s where my family is. My kids are there; my brothers, my sisters, they’re all there.”

But he is unsure of its future. The damage is catastrophic.

In the area where he lived, he said that “90 per cent of the houses are compromised”. “I’m talking about roofs gone, houses totally collapsed everywhere.”

He added: “I’m just wondering where we’re going to live when I go back home, what I’m going to do.”

The New York Times