HURRICANE BETSY VERSUS HURRICANE IRMA!

We are ready for Hurricane Irma! Our shutters are installed and we have stocked up with water and food to last us a few days.

Around this time fifty-two years’ ago Hurricane Betsy pounded Nassau. I had just arrived here on my journey “around the world”!

As a young woman, sharing an apartment with three other girls above the Verdant Gardens Coffee Shop, Dowdeswell Street, it was all very exciting to me! Our landlord had battened up the apartment, but left the bathroom window so we could see out of it. I remember balancing on the bathtub during the storm and watching a large roof flap on a tall building at the top of Collins Avenue!

Two guys the girls and I knew offered to camp out in our front room and “protect” us. Instead, they consumed a whole bottle of rum and passed out on the living room floor!

I believe Hurricane Betsy passed over Nassau on Tuesday, September 6th, 1965 (at 135 m.p.h. according to an online source). I met Erskine a week and a half later on Friday, September 17^th, when a friend of his brought him to our apartment to meet us. We started dating the next day and he introduced me to his parents and some of his sisters about a week later on his birthday.

Hurricane Irma is a much more dangerous hurricane than Betsy was, but fortunately, it is travelling WNW of Nassau and we should only get tropical storm force winds here. Those in the South Eastern Bahamas have not been so lucky. We are waiting for news from those Family Islands and pray that they have not had any injuries or deaths. Most of the residents were evacuated to Nassau from those islands a couple of days ago, because Hurricane Irma was a Cat 5, said to be the largest hurricane to ever affect the Atlantic region.