The Tribune

By RIEL MAJOR

Tribune Staff Reporter

rmajor@tribunemedia.net

A MAN had to resort to blasting the window of his home with a shotgun in order for his family to escape rising flood waters caused by Hurricane Dorian.

Celeste Stubbs, an Abaco evacuee, fought back her tears yesterday as she told reporters, “We have our lives and we didn’t think we would have that.”

Mrs Stubbs added: “We lost everything, but things can be replaced. We live on a ridge and it’s a slight ridge in front of our house and we never dreamed we would have got (that much) water.

“We were in the room, in my daughter’s bedroom in the front and literally like we had boarded ourselves in and the water just... my father-in-law braced against the door and the water just came and buckled the door.

“Luckily my husband had a shotgun and shot the window out and he just kicked, kicked, kicked and kicked the shutter out and we got out. We were lucky we were on the lull side of the storm and we kind of just held on to the shutters and whatever we could.”

Mrs Stubbs said she knew Hurricane Dorian “was going to be bad” but her family never dreamed it would be that disastrous.

“My cousin’s little boy is two and he was sitting in the truck and he told his mom ‘I hear a choo choo’ and they said that was probably a tornado,” she said. “It’s just crazy, it’s too many stories to tell and every story is like mine.”

“(They are) digging people out of rubble and it’s so many people alive, a lot of lives lost but there a lot of miracles, just miracles you just don’t even know. ...Because it had look like a bomb had dropped, I didn’t know where I was not because I was you know, in shock but because you know...you didn’t know where you were...

“We got out, when the eye finally came, my father-in-law came around the corner and it was the biggest, biggest relief to see because we didn’t know.”

Nine-year-old Aiden Stubbs shared his experience with reporters yesterday of his encounter during the storm.

Aiden said a window cracked and water pushed in and broke down the door.

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He said: “We had to swim in the eye to our neighbour. Then two days after our friends came and pick us up.”