City Prepares To Welcome Hurricane Dorian Refugees

Sitting in front of an image of an entire neighborhood in the Bahamas destroyed and submerged in water, Mayor Toni Harp reconvened a task force to coordinate emergency support for evacuees from this hemisphere’s latest natural disaster: Hurricane Dorian.

The mayor held a press conference Monday morning in the city’s Emergency Operations Center in the municipal building at 200 Orange St. to announce the city’s planned emergency relief efforts for the Bahamas, where at least 44 people have died and at least 75,000 have been rendered homeless by the Category 5 storm that made landfall on Sept. 1.

This task force, a partnership among the city’s police, fire, health, emergency operations, and elderly services departments along with outside humanitarian agencies like the American Red Cross and Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), was originally convened nearly two years ago in response to the devastation and fall out from Hurricane Maria’s ravaging of Puerto Rico.

Rick Fontana, the city’s emergency operations chief who headed the Hurricane Maria task force and who will also head the Hurricane Dorian iteration, said that the city ultimately welcomed roughly 3,000 Puerto Rican refugees in the wake of that October 2017 crisis. Over the subsequent year-and-a-half, he said, the task force and its state, national, and nonprofit partners helped provide logistical support, clothing, food, medical care, and transitional shelter for those evacuees, as well as cash assistance for people still on the island.

“This is another time for that sense of selflessness that characterizes New Haven and its people,” Harp said Monday. ​“The people of the Bahamas are in their hour of need, and will remain vulnerable and worse for the foreseeable future.”

Fontana said that the number of people killed and left homeless by the hurricane will almost certainly climb in the coming days, weeks, and months.

“They were asked to do vertical evacuation when that hurricane hit,” he said. ​“Unfortunately, those single-story homes were less than 20 feet.” Meaning that many who climbed to the top of their single-story homes to evade the worst of the hurricane almost certainly felt the brunt of the storm that hovered over the island commonwealth for 28 hours straight.

“The numbers are going to be staggering,” he predicted.

He said the task force will put together an evacuation assistance pamphlet, similar to what one that it made in the wake of Hurricane Maria, with a list of partner agencies and emergency support services that evacuees and their friends and families can turn to for help.

He said the task force has not yet reached out to the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) to start coordinating local implementation of national emergency relief efforts that may play out in Connecticut, but that that is a top priority for the newly reconvened body.

Making evacuees feel safe and secure if and when they come to Connecticut will be the task force’s top priority, he said.

Fontana said he does not know how big the city’s current Bahamian community is, nor how many refugees the city is expecting to receive. New Haven received very few evacuees in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, he said, but many more evacuees than it had originally expected following Hurricane Maria.

“Evacuees will go to places where they have friends of relatives,” said IRIS Executive Director Chris George. ​“No one is just going to spin a map of the U.S. and put their finger down on Connecticut. They will come here if they have friends or relatives.”

Figuring out how large the city and the region’s current Bahamian population is, he said, is an important next step for figuring out how many people might be coming.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full press conference.