The 2010s Taught Us Climate Change Is Affecting Our Health
I first met Valery as I assessed her asthma on a small corner of Abaco Island in the Bahamas, while she sat dazed on what was left of her porch, eyes fixed on her husband Eric’s overturned SUV. With an N95 breathing mask over her face she described life before Hurricane Dorian tore through her town of Marsh Harbor. She was elegant, regal, and spoke with flawless British grammar and diction, but just ten days after the colossal storm hit, her tired eyes and quivering voice hinted she was struggling to process the momentous shift in her future.
“So, we’re an elderly couple, we came to Abaco in 2000, more or less about that time” said Valery. “We started to develop a farm out here, just small crops. We loved the peace and serenity that you see all around, and we’d been doing quite well, until Dorian came and wiped us all out.”
On September 1st 2019, Category 5 Hurricane Dorian crawled slowly at just one MPH over the northern Bahamian islands of Abaco and Grand Bahamas. For two days the islands were battered by sustained winds of 185 MPH and a storm surge as high as 20 feet, making it not only the strongest storm on record to ever strike the Bahamas, but one of the most powerful hurricanes to ever spin through Atlantic waters.
“The school where I did speech pathology in, they sent me a text saying the school is destroyed…my livelihood is gone, and my husband’s livelihood is gone” said Valery.
Hurricane Dorian was the second to last major Atlantic hurricane of the decade, and the latest in a line of progressively louder clarion calls signaling a new normal is no longer waiting in the midst, but has arrived. 2019 was the fourth consecutive year to feature at least one Category 5 Atlantic hurricane, and one of just seven seasons where more than one Category 5 hurricane formed. According to climatologist consensus the ferocity and devastation released by Dorian on the island archipelago was fueled by a warming ocean, a consequence of human derived green house gas emissions and climate change. If the 2010s have taught us anything, it’s to expect more frequent and larger storms.
As a disaster response physician, treading through Dorian’s ruins, listening to survivor stories, and attempting to rationalize the grotesque nature of this thrashing was vertigo inducing. If what climatologists say is true, then all of us, everyone with a carbon footprint, played a hand in this catastrophic disaster — and on an afternoon just outside of Marsh Harbor it left even the hardiest of men speechless, in white tyvek suits, retching on the smell of an exploded pig carcass baking in the hot Bahamian sun.
Hurricane Dorian approached the Bahamas from the northeast, and thus the northern half of the islands were utterly apocalyptic; it appeared as if an atomic bomb had detonated.
The Australian pine trees that dot the island had all snapped and fallen Southwest in the direction of Dorian’s initial prevailing winds — winds strong enough to dislodge metal highway dividers and thrust them through palm trees.
The salt and storm surge had suffocated all the islands vegitation into a muted and dead brown. The rolling hilltops had been whipped bare by the ferocious winds, and the roots of fallen trees now rose higher than their broken branches. These roots were jagged, sharp, and wove together ungracefully to appear more like a haunting Tim Burton creation than Sunday shade.
The town of Marsh Harbor was nearly deserted, and debris was scattered everywhere. There wasn’t a single working car that didn’t have a broken window, a missing windshield, or a major cavitating dent. Remnants of tin roofs, upended semi trucks, living room furniture, and fishing boats were stacked at unimaginable heights and in puzzling orientations. Just days after the search and rescue had been officially called off, the most frequent sign of human occupancy was the smell of death, and the typical island soundtrack of song birds had been replaced by the groan of bent sheet metal in the wind.
“We knew the dead remained buried under the rubble…”
said officer Goodwin, Toronto police officer and Incident Commander of disaster relief organization Team Rubicon Canada (TRC). “The smell of death, the devastation to buildings and property, survivors wandering the streets shell shocked, it was something to take in.”
Officer Goodwin and TRC, a predominately ex-military volunteer organization, were in Abaco to muck out debris and restore roofs to large structures like schools and churches — structures that could be converted into shelters. Once these structures were made livable again, residents could return to the island and begin the slow process of restoring their own domiciles.
TRC also assisted residents who either were unable to help themselves, or those in a position to restore the local economy, especially farmers. The goal was that when fuel, food, shelter, and clean water returned to the island, some resemblance of society could burgeon again. Goodwin was constantly on the lookout for who to help, and during his daily reconnaissance he found an elderly couple named Eric and Valery. He ran into them at the local airport while they were attempting to barter a chainsaw for a spare generator, because during those fraught several weeks post Dorian, money was useless.
Eric and Valery were lucky — they were among the 70% of Abaco’s population able to evacuate prior to Dorian’s landfall. Seven days after the storm hit the couple had returned to reassess their farm and home, a home Eric had built by hand twenty years prior. Eric needed a chainsaw to clear the several dozen downed trees blocking his long dirt driveway, and luckily, Goodwin had brought chainsaw specialists for precisely this task.
The very next day these “sawyers” went to work.
Prior to arriving on the property, Goodwin had sent out a scouting team that returned with a warning of a dead pig in the yard. TRC preliminarily flagged the site with a biohazard contamination, which seemed only a minor complication, but the extent of the contamination didn’t become apparent until the last tree was cleared. When the team gained access to the interior of Eric and Valerie’s property, an overwhelming acrid smell became apparent. Strewn across the yard were chunks of pig carcass. Intestines, a jaw bone, legs, and unidentifiable swine body parts were scattered circumferentially from one central area.
The pig had obviously exploded, but the circumstances regarding how were at the time unknown. The best the TRC volunteers could guess was Dorian’s 185 MPH winds launched the pig into the air, colliding it with a tree or piece of debris, giving authenticity to the colloquialism “when pigs fly”. The truth was much more complicated.
Eric and Valery almost weathered Dorian inside their farmhouse, but at the urging of their children, they evacuated to the main island of Nassau the day prior to the storm’s landfall. While Dorian raged, their thoughts remained on the farm they had worked so hard to build.
“I’ve had to stomach heaps of things in my life” said Eric. “We tried to keep an open mind. We may return and find nothing. We may return and find the house intact, or find the house half gone. When I built the house, I made sure that it was built with enough rocks and everything in place. So when we finally came and saw the house, we thought, it’s still here, it’s salvageable”.
What Eric and Valery didn't know was that somehow in the melee of the storm, after their front door had seemingly blown apart, a pit-bull had chased a large pig into their home. It’s completely unknown why, when, or for how long the two large animals sheltered and likely attacked one-another during the heat of the 48 hour storm. Days later, after the winds had cleared, there was some unexpected news for Eric still waiting anxiously in Nassau.
“Someone was at the house right after the storm, and they told me there was a dead pig in there. He couldn’t take it out, it was too big. And he couldn’t go in because there was a live pit-bull.” said Eric with a smile. Despite all they had lost, Eric was still able to see the humor in what might have transpired between those two animals over a harrowing 48 hours.
But as the rotting pig sat for almost one week in the corner of Eric and Valery’s living room, the wet walls absorbed its decay. The house was already a structural hazard, but it also became a biological one.
Eventually the pit-bull left the house on its own accord, and several days before TRC arrived, an official from the city morgue was able to pull the pig out into the yard. After a few days of the pig lying exposed to the Bahamian summer sun, bloat accumulated so rapidly that the dead animal exploded. Thankfully it occurred several meters away from the house, but it scattered rotting pig carcass in all directions, and was why the smell outside the house was just as terrible as inside.
Goodwin instituted mandatory full personal protection equipment for anyone who entered the property, which included N95 breathing masks and full tyvek suits. With the daily heat index reaching into the 90s, it put TRC’s volunteers at considerable risk for heat stroke — but there was no other choice.
Goodwin addressed Valery as his team went to work. “I’m going to discourage you from going in, because the black mold there is significant. What it’s going to look like inside by the time we’re finished, is that the walls will be taken out, and you’re just going to see the studs. If there are keepsakes that we recognize, we’ll bring them out here for you.”
To limit the heat risk to volunteers, nearly all veterans hardened from years of military service, they worked in 15 minute shifts demarcated by a loud whistle. The pace was brisk, the sweat plentiful, and the movement purposeful. The house began to resemble a crime scene.
The team were largely silent, but as the smell began to overpower their N95 masks, occasional retching was heard above the sound of brooms sweeping broken glass. Eric and Valeries personal keepsakes were carefully placed outside as tears welled up behind the team’s protective eyewear. Their eyes spoke when their mouths and face could not. They all understood Eric and Valery’s lives, and health, had been changed forever.
Climate scientists point to global carbon dioxide emissions to explain the severity to which Dorian struck. At a very basic conceptual level hurricanes are heat machines that are fueled by warmer oceans. For every 1C° increase in water temperature, a hurricane will increase its wind speed by 7%, which translates to a 23% increase in physical destructive capability.
According to University of Miami meteorologist Brian McNoldy, when Dorian struck, the waters surrounding the Bahamas and Florida were “cooking”. Hurricane Dorian used these warmer waters to rapidly increase from a Category 3, to Category 5, in under two days. A month later Pacific Super Typhoon Hagibis exploded from a tropical storm to a super typhoon in just 18 hours, the fastest rate since Cyclone Yates in 1996. Hagibis eventually caused 58 deaths in Japan and cancelled several matches of the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
But the frequency of extreme weather events and the number of lives affected like Eric and Valery’s have also been increasing. Severe meteorological storms are now twice as frequent than in 1980. The number of floods, landslides, and avalanches have quadrupled in the last 40 years. Extreme temperatures, droughts, and forest fires are all increasing across the globe. The graphs of global CO2, global average temperature, and global extreme weather events are all exhibiting the same exponential increase. To make things even worse, for every 1F° increase in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4% more water vapor. Our warmer temperatures are causing more powerful and wetter storms.
Despite the destruction inflicted on Eric and Valery’s home, ultimately they realized it was material. A month after the storm, the official death toll in the Bahamas was 56, yet almost 600 people who were unable to evacuate remained missing. However, there was one very personal keepsake destroyed that Valery could barely speak about.
“All my crockery, all my dishes and everything, are in perfect condition. I just need to take them out. What I really don’t like to talk about is…” Valery paused, “…my diary.”
“It sort of highlighted all the high points of our marriage, our children, and it’s been destroyed. I was going to write an autobiography, as the first speech pathologist here in Abaco. If my children wanted to know what happened in their early life, right from birth, going through all the different stages of their lives, it was all preserved in there. Plus, I had mementos and relics and schoolwork from their early childhood” Valery recounted.
“I saw it, but I don’t know. Even if I dry it out, some of the pages are smeared and you can’t read all of it” said Valery.
Goodwin and TRC were able to locate the diary in the alcove of the second floor master bedroom covered in wet insulation. The remaining pages only had entries dating back to 2001, but it was enough to bring life back to Valery’s tired eyes. As Valery held the diary, pieces of the wet paper slipped through her fingers — but part of the life she had lost was back in her hands.
If what climatologists say is true, everyone with a carbon footprint played a hand in this disaster; but optimistically it also means we are all part of its solution. These solutions are never more needed, as climate change is no longer a problem of just the natural world, of melting glaciers, polar bears, and sea level rise. It is now a human one.
What happened in Abaco is only the most violent and obvious deterioration of public health we are seeing. Other than extreme weather events, climate change is fueling the rise of human diseases across the globe, creating refugees, and affecting public health on the largest of scales.
Studies from Bangladesh are linking heat waves to cholera epidemics and sea level rise to doubling the rate of miscarriage. Longer falls and shorter winters are allowing tick borne illnesses such as Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis to spread into new areas throughout North America, Europe, and Australia. Malaria, Zika, yellow fever, and dengue are moving into new territories with large increases in suitable mosquito habitat opening across the globe. Forest fires and the soot they carry are contributing to increased rates of heart attacks, asthma, and lung disease. Overwhelming heat waves are sending construction workers to hospitals at record numbers, killing postal workers and giving almost 20,000 agricultural workers in South America the uniformly fatal diagnosis of kidney failure. When CO2 levels reach 500ppm the protein content of rice, wheat, and barely will decrease, and in combination with increased population projections, our food systems are at risk of collapse.
The 2010s have shown us climate change is affecting our health regardless of culture, origin, or belief. Nothing can change our lives or demolish our dreams more than to lose the health we once had, and just like Valeries diary, the longer we wait to act, the more certain our health will slip through our fingers.
