U-SoA Team and Associate Professor Sonia Chao, Help Dorian Victims Rebuild

Bahamians Convert Shipping Containers into Housing
U-SoA Team and Associate Professor Sonia Chao, Help Dorian Victims Rebuild
George Bolter, left, and his parents walk through the remains of his home destroyed by Hurricane Dorian in the Pine Bay neighborhood of Freeport, Bahamas, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019. Photo: Associated Press 

They are the Caribbean’s newest homeless, left without a place to live after Hurricane Dorian reduced their dwellings to piles of wood and other debris. 

“There’s nothing left” has become their all-too familiar lament. 

But it’s not that the residents of Grand Bahama and Abaco Islands didn’t put up a fight. In fact, they did, boarding up their homes and stocking supplies. 

Dorian, which made landfall as a category 5 storm, was just too powerful. By some estimates, the cyclone’s 185-mph winds damaged or destroyed some 13,000 homes in one group of islands in the Bahamas alone, creating an apocalyptic scene of disaster. 

For Sonia Chao, a research associate professor in the University of Miami School of Architecture, the initial images and video footage of Dorian’s destruction on the island nation hit too close to home. Read more.