Tara hoped the roof wouldn't blow off

What Was That Like - True Stories. Real People.

Tara recounts her terrifying experience during Hurricane Dorian while sheltering with her family in their hurricane-proof home in the Bahama

Key takeaways

• Even well-prepared homes can face extreme danger during Category 5 hurricanes.

Main topics

• Hurricane Dorian

Notable quotes

"I was a very obvious tourist alone carrying things somebody else might want. And if one of those trucks stopped, I didn't actually have a plan."

Conclusion

Tara's story underscores the fragility of safety even in prepared environments and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) I live in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, and I like it here. I never have to shovel snow. I don't have to drive on ice. And earthquakes are pretty rare. I can ride my bike almost year-round. But one of the worst things about living in Florida is going through hurricane season. I'm in the Tampa Bay area, which is on the Gulf of Mexico side, so we're a little more sheltered. But even here, we sometimes have hurricanes that come up into the Gulf and cause some damage when they decide to finally come on land. My son David was actually born during a hurricane. Tara knows about hurricanes because she's been through a terrifying one. A few years ago, she came on the podcast and talked about her experience with Hurricane Dorian. She and her family were at home in the direct path of this Category 5 hurricane. The floodwaters were rising. The high winds were threatening to tear their roof off. And all they could do was sit in the dark attic and watch the water keep rising. Speaker 3 (1:26) Real people in unreal situations. Speaker 1 (1:31) The eerie silence when I walked in and he's just staring at me. I was like, hello, like, Speaker 4 (1:37) are you okay? And then I had to tell Speaker 1 (1:39) him it was me. There was just blood everywhere. They're shouting, they're screaming, they're being hit by bullets, they're hitting the ground. And in that moment, I literally thought, this is how I die. Everything changed then. Speaker 4 (1:55) And I just thought to myself, this isn't happening. Speaker 5 (1:58) Every single story deserves to be heard. Speaker 3 (2:02) I'm Scott Johnson, and this is What Was That Like? Speaker 3 (2:12) As a podcaster, there's nothing more gratifying than being able to make a difference in the lives of real people. If you like seeing that happen and you enjoy true crime podcasts, I have a show you're going to love. It's called Proof. If you heard the first season of Proof, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This show is co-hosted by Susan Simpson of Undisclosed. She's also an attorney. And Jacinda Davis of Evil Lives Here. They created Season 1 by investigating the story of two young men in Georgia who were serving life sentences for supposedly murdering their friend. These men had spent 25 years in prison, and on December 8, 2022, based on evidence that was unearthed by Susan and Jacinda for the podcast, they were released. Can you imagine being in prison for 25 years? and then getting released because of a podcast? And now the second season of Proof, called Murder at the Warehouse, is being released. Susan and Jacinda are digging into this new case about Renee Ramos in Manteca, California. Her body was found under a pile of debris, and her boyfriend and another man were arrested and convicted. But things don't seem to add up. Did investigators actually ignore tips that pointed to other suspects? Could this be another case where an innocent person has spent years locked up in prison? It's all going to come out on this new season. Fans of true crime and investigative series won't want to miss this riveting new season. Follow the case as Susan and Jacinda uncover long overlooked evidence about what really happened to Renee by listening to Proof Murder Speaker 2 (4:00) at the Warehouse. wherever you get your podcasts. I Speaker 3 (4:03) love podcasts that are entertaining, informative, and offer content that's actionable, something I can actually use in my life. And when I find one show that offers all of those things, that's like winning the lottery. And that's the Jordan Harbinger Show. Okay, obviously, winning the lottery is a hell of a lot better than having a podcast you really like, but you know what I mean. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but Jordan Harbinger has been in my rotation for more than 10 years. Actually, I don't think there's any podcast that I've listened to for that long other than Jordan. And why? Because he has such a huge variety of guests. Just recently, he talked with Joe Loya, a former bank robber. Where else are you going to hear from someone who used to rob banks? And I loved his conversation with William H. Macy, the actor. Jordan gets these people to tell stories that you don't hear when they're interviewed by some boring Hollywood reporter. He talks to authors, athletes, scientists, even the occasional mafia hitman. And that's what I mean. It's never boring. And I can tell you from a personal standpoint, Jordan is a fun guy. Legally, I'm not allowed to talk about the time he and I drank too much in a dive bar in San Francisco. And we dared each other to streak down Grant Avenue in Chinatown. So you're not going to hear that from me. But you should definitely check out his show. Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show. That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R, on Apple Podcasts, Speaker 2 (5:42) Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 3 (5:47) You were born and raised in the Bahamas. Have you had experience with hurricanes before? I assume you most have. Speaker 5 (5:53) I've had experience with hurricanes my entire life. My parents have had experience with hurricanes their entire lives. Grandparents. It's just the thing when you live in the Bahamas, you deal with hurricanes. Speaker 3 (6:05) It's part of life. It's Speaker 5 (6:07) part of life. Speaker 3 (6:08) But this time you kind of topped your previous experience. Speaker 5 (6:12) Tenfold. Yeah. Speaker 3 (6:15) Okay, can you describe your family at the time when this happened? Who was in your family? Speaker 5 (6:21) So it was myself, my wife, Catherine, and our six-year-old daughter, Hazel, and we had five dogs. Speaker 3 (6:28) Five dogs. And I know my listeners' ears perked up just then thinking, oh, hey, five dogs. What kind of dogs were they? Speaker 5 (6:36) We had four dachshunds, so sausage dogs. And then we had one medium-sized dog, which in the Bahamas we refer to mutts as potcakes. So we had a husky-potcake mix kind of dog. Speaker 3 (6:51) All right. And your house at the time, how was it constructed? Speaker 5 (6:56) We had a concrete block home in the Bahamas. That's generally the way to go if you can afford to do so. You build a concrete block home. Wooden roof, metal shingle construction. elevated because we were near the water. Nice, solid, hurricane-proof windows, you know, the best ones on the market that are supposed to stand up to 150 mile an hour wind, all built for hurricanes. Speaker 3 (7:23) Really, I mean, you had everything in place. You did everything you could in advance preparation. Before this happened, were you ever nervous or apprehensive about hurricanes, or it's just something that happens? Speaker 5 (7:35) No, you're always nervous and apprehensive about hurricanes because you know that they can cause severe damage. It's always nervous. Whenever there's one coming, you prepare, you get ready, you do everything you can. You're guaranteed something's going to get wrecked and you're prepared to deal with the aftermath. Speaker 3 (7:54) Well, I know hurricane season for the Atlantic starts June 1. What are your standard practices at that time to prepare specifically for the upcoming months? Speaker 5 (8:04) June 1 is a normal summer in the Bahamas. We rarely see severe storms in June and July. Very, very rarely. We'll get a tropical storm. It blows through in a day. The kids are out of school. You clean up your yard and that's it. It's a non-event. It's not until August, September, and October when you really start to pay attention and start to worry about it. Speaker 3 (8:28) When you know one is coming, do you go to the store and find that the shelves are empty from the water? Stuff like that? I mean, that's what happens here in Florida. Speaker 5 (8:36) Yes. If you wait last minute, if you try to go to a grocery store or hardware store 24 hours before we're expected to start having wind, you're out of everything and you're out of luck. So we always would prepare three days ahead at the very least so that we weren't stuck in lines or didn't have the things that we wanted to have. Speaker 3 (8:55) How far in advance did you know that Hurricane Dorian was going to be a really big one? Speaker 5 (9:01) I'd say about five or six days out. At that point, it was, oh, wow, this is strong. This is like a category four now. And then the forecasters are saying it's going to be a five. That's, yeah, that's pretty bad. Then five is as high as it goes, right? And at that point, it's still way out there. Like five days out, those spaghetti models that you see all over the TV, they're all over the place. So you're watching and hoping that it's going to turn or move or that spaghetti model that says it's going to stay out to sea, that's the right one. Speaker 3 (9:36) Yeah, everyone hopes, right? Everyone Speaker 5 (9:38) hopes. Speaker 3 (9:39) Do some people actually evacuate the islands when they see something like that coming? Speaker 5 (9:45) Yes. Yeah, a lot of expats, foreigners, second homeowners, a lot of those folks will leave in the three days ahead. They'll get on a flight and get out. Speaker 3 (9:56) You got word that Dorian was bound for your location and was still really big. What was your plan in those, like the few days in advance of that? Speaker 5 (10:09) In the few days in advance of that, we started with, okay, groceries. Let's stock up on the things that we need to have. Let's make sure we've got the water we need. Let's get the car filled up with gas. Let's get the jugs for the... generator for after the storm filled up with gas. Start thinking about where we're going to put our patio furniture and move our potted plants. Speaker 3 (10:33) As Dorian approached, were you more concerned about the wind or the possibility of water rising? Speaker 5 (10:41) We were worried about the wind. The wind was always the fear. With hurricanes in general, the wind is always the fear unless you live on the beach. If you live on the beach, that's an entirely different experience. Most Bahamians do not build their houses on the beach because of that reason. Speaker 3 (11:01) So tell us about what happened when it started. You pretty much saw that your preparations were all just pointless, right? Speaker 5 (11:09) Before it hit Grand Bahama Island in Freeport, where we were, it hit the island of Abaco, which is about 100 miles away. The storm was moving exceptionally slowly. So it's barely moving forward at two, three, max four miles per hour. Speaker 3 (11:25) Which is a bad thing. Speaker 5 (11:27) Which is very bad. The longer it takes to go through, the more damage there is. And so it kind of went through Abaco and there were Facebook videos and images and stories and they didn't lose cellular signal, which has never happened before in a storm. Yeah, you have a storm, you lose cell signal. No one knows what's going on until after. This time, there were videos of people as the roof was pulling off the house in Abaco. And there was a lot of water and the whole town was flooded and you see people, cars floating by. And so the images were terrifying at that point. But we were already at a point of, okay, we're hunkered down. We're ready for it. Can we make a big change now? What are we going to do? We've got five dogs. Where are we going to go? Speaker 3 (12:17) So it hit Abaco first. And did you know, based on its speed, how much time did you have before it would get to you? Speaker 5 (12:25) We knew we had a good 12 hours before it got bad. The wind would start before that. And we had already started to have tropical storm force winds when it was over Abaco. But it was at the speed that it was moving for us to have really bad wind. And when I say really bad, I mean like 100 miles per hour. It was going to be a few hours before we got there. But we're already hunkered down. It's late in the afternoon. There are no shelters on the island that would take us with five dogs. It would mean leaving our five dogs behind. Not an option. Never was going to be an option. And we were just kind of focused on the... Positive. We're okay. We're safe. We've had hurricanes in this house before. We had had Hurricane Matthew three years before. We were fine. Okay, we're going to be fine. We're going to stay here. Speaker 3 (13:14) Looking back on it now, can you evaluate on how much of that was realistic thinking versus how much was optimistic thinking? Speaker 5 (13:23) It was probably 50-50. Yeah, 50 % of it was, I'm just going to talk myself into the fact that we're going to be okay while I'm actually terrified. And then 50 % of it was actually logical. The logistics of Abaco, how high the island is, the way that the island's positioned along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean versus the way that Grand Bahama sits on a bank. All of those things come into play with the way a hurricane would interact with the land and what we could expect as far as weather. Speaker 3 (13:55) Take us from the time the storm surge came into your home. When did you first see that? Speaker 5 (14:01) We started having hurricane force winds 1030, August 31st, 2019. And so we went to bed listening to the storm. We got up a few times as the night wore on, check that every three hour update. What's it doing? Where is it going? Is it slowing down? Is it going to make that turn that we're desperately wanting so that we don't get the worst of it? And we got up around four o'clock and looked outside and the water. Our entire backyard, our entire street was gone underwater. Speaker 5 (14:35) We had been up three hours before and everything was fine. Four o'clock in the morning, the water was, we were already surrounded. Speaker 3 (14:42) That also means you're kind of cut off from any help too. Speaker 5 (14:47) Yeah. At that point where it's, it's, we're already past help. There's no one that can do that in that kind of wind and that kind of water without endangering themselves. Speaker 3 (14:56) At that point, were there any agencies or people offering to, you know, being able to rescue anyone anyway? Speaker 5 (15:04) No, not there's nothing you are. You are stuck. You are on your own. Whatever decision you have made about where you're going to be at that point. That's it till it's done. Speaker 4 (15:14) When it first started to come in the house, for Speaker 5 (15:17) me, it was sort of, okay, we're going to have water in the house. We're going to have ankle deep water. That's really annoying. We're going to have to have house repairs. Okay, let's see what we can save. Let's get these photo albums up onto the highest shelf we can in the house. Make sure they're safe. Let's try using some sandbags to kind of slow some of the water coming into the house. At that point, it was still, we're not in. peril danger yet. It's more like things are going to get broken. We're going to have to make repairs. Speaker 3 (15:48) At what point did it cross over to the feeling that you were in danger? Speaker 5 (15:53) Within an hour. Within an hour of the water first coming in the house, it had risen another three or four inches. It was rising really fast. And then the whole house had water in it. And then the sewage system started backing up. And then the house. It was not pleasant to be in smell or anything else. And then it was, oh, shit, we're in a lot of trouble now. What's going to happen if the water doesn't stop? Speaker 3 (16:21) You had mentioned in what you sent me that fear of drowning outweighed logical thought. Can you elaborate on that? Speaker 5 (16:31) At the time, I thought everything that I was thinking was logical. The ability to look back on it now in hindsight and realize that it was not logical has come from years of talk therapy. At the time, I thought every decision we were making was absolutely thought out clearly. There were pros and cons, the consequences of our decisions, like everything was, we were pushing through and we were going to be okay, even though we were terrified. And so at the time, I thought it was completely logical, all the decisions that we were making. Speaker 3 (17:05) And then you made a decision that was not logical, looking back on it. Speaker 5 (17:10) Looking back on it, it's not logical now. the water kept rising. We got to a point that we were sitting on top of our kitchen countertops trying to stay dry. We had our six-year-old and three of the dogs bundled in wet blankets on our kitchen island. And once the water reached the top of the countertops, it started to be, are we going to drown inside of our house? The water's not stopping. We're going to run out of breathing room. We have to get out of this house. We're going to drown. And then it was, Speaker 5 (17:44) If the water reaches a certain height so that all of our windows and doors are underwater, there's going to be a pressure difference between the inside and the outside. What if we can't get the windows open? What if we can't get the door open? And that's when the tunnel vision and the fear, fight or flight, not logical thought kicked in. We had to get out of the house right now. Speaker 3 (18:08) So you're in your house, your cement block house, and you made the decision to leave the house. You know, as I think about this, my dogs won't go out to pee when it's raining. Can you describe the process of how do you get five dogs to leave the relative safety of the house when there's a hurricane outside? Speaker 5 (18:31) The blessing was that four of them were really little. So all four of our dachshunds were 10, 11 pounds. So you can manhandle that. Our mutt, our pot cake mix, was 50 pounds. Not nearly as easy to manhandle. Speaker 3 (18:51) So how did you do that? Speaker 5 (18:52) We all went out through a bedroom window that we were able to open. We shoved. floating things and everything we thought that we needed to be okay outside, some things to stay together. We used extension cords to tie ourselves together so that we couldn't like float away from each other. We had a floating mattress that we kind of pushed out of a window. And then we kind of just one by one procession, get one dog out, get the next dog out and threw them on top of the mattress, which basically was a raft. Not a very good raft because it was sitting two or three inches below the water, but it was floating. To get our larger dog out was not easy. I mean, I was on the outside. My wife, Catherine, was on the inside. She's pushing. I'm pulling. The dog was fighting because the dog had a better idea how stupid the idea was than we did. And finally, we were able to get her out of the window. Speaker 3 (19:49) Did you all have life jackets? Speaker 5 (19:51) No life jackets. We didn't own a boat. We didn't need life jackets. We were four feet elevated from ground level. The water was never going to get that high. The water has never gotten that high before. Speaker 3 (20:03) So did you all fit on the floating things or were you in the water? Speaker 5 (20:07) We were in the water. So we had our daughter with a pool float around her waist. That was her life jacket. And the five dogs were on the mattress. And Catherine and I are treading water, floating. holding onto patio furniture that's really not floating, but is not sinking. Speaker 3 (20:26) And how were the dogs handling this? Were they, obviously they must've been stressed out, but what were they doing? Speaker 5 (20:32) Very stressed out, not wanting, not holding still, obviously crawling back and forth across the mattress, falling off, having to be retrieved, falling off again and swimming in the wrong direction, having to be retrieved. It was a constant battle of keep everyone's head above water. Speaker 3 (20:48) How long were you outside? Speaker 5 (20:50) It felt like hours. It felt like hours of fighting the waves and the wind and keeping together and not losing the dogs and our daughter screaming to the top of her lungs. We were outside for 30 minutes. Longest 30 minutes of my life. Speaker 3 (21:07) Did Hazel, your daughter, object to going outside at all? Or she's just, hey, the grown-ups know what they're doing. Speaker 5 (21:14) The grown-ups know what they're doing. Until we got outside. Speaker 3 (21:17) Yeah, kids have to trust the parents, obviously. Speaker 5 (21:20) Did Speaker 3 (21:21) you see any other people while you were outside? Speaker 5 (21:24) No. No. Our closest neighbor was 600 feet away. They had a second story. To their house, we did not. We had a ranch single story. At one point, we considered swimming or trying to swim to the neighbor's house with their second story. We decided really quickly that either we would get separated or we would all drown if we tried to swim it. I mean, our daughter was a really good swimmer at six years old. She could dive in a scuba diving pool down 12 feet at six years old. She was a really good swimmer. But there was no way we were going to fight the wind and the waves to get to that house without all drowning. Speaker 3 (22:01) What made you decide to finally say, okay, we've got to go back in the house? Speaker 5 (22:06) I went under more than once. I couldn't keep my head up. I couldn't keep checking on the dogs. I couldn't make sure that Hazel was stable. I couldn't make sure that my wife was okay. I went under and inhaled salt water more than once. And the second time that I came up, I looked at Catherine and said, we have to go back in. Speaker 5 (22:28) When we went back in, we had about three, four feet still of breathing space. So a nine foot ceiling. So water height would have been about five feet, six feet. You couldn't stand in there. You were still swimming inside the house. We had to dive back in. The window was underwater when we went back in. Speaker 4 (22:49) The window Speaker 5 (22:49) that we had decided to go out of was our master bedroom window. And our master bed was floating. The bed was floating. The mattress and box springs were floating in the middle of the room. So when we got back in, it was, okay, that's where our daughter and the five dogs are going to go. That's their mattress. They're safer there for now until we figure it out. Catherine and I