The grandchildren called the shelter Final Destination, after a favourite film. Tedica Alexander, 61, a resident of Union Island in St Vincent and the Grenadines, recalls with pride – and a tremor in her voice – how her nine grandchildren supported her and others at the Ashton community centre when Hurricane Beryl hit the area in July 2024.
Alexander arrived after she was advised to seek shelter in Ashton, rather than at Clifton school as she had expected as it was closer. As the storm approached, the shelter quickly filled up. The building’s windows shattered, and flood waters rose above ankle height. “If it had lasted one more minute, the door would have given way,” she says.
Her grandchildren stayed at the door, fighting against the wind and rain to let the latecomers in. At one point, she rested her head against a pillar, crying, while her six-year-old granddaughter whispered words of comfort.
“We were the first to arrive,” says Alexander. In the end, 47 children and 147 adults sheltered there, including three people who used wheelchairs. “Everyone was praying,” she says.
This experience marked the beginning of her many weeks’ stay at the community centre, during which Alexander voluntarily took responsibility for cooking and overseeing the site’s overall management, with support from other residents.
The role of caretaker is a familiar one for many women during a natural disaster. Yet studies show that it can make the experience more difficult for women, since they are often fending not only for themselves but for others such.
In 2022, UN Women reported “evidence of women’s increased vulnerability [due to] the pre-existing social and cultural demands on women and girls as primary caregivers with the imbalanced responsibilities for care of elderly people, children and the sick” in the aftermath of a disaster, and that social inequities and gendered roles make women and girls more likely to be killed in a disaster.
While an emergency shelter may be a haven from a natural disaster, they offer little security against gender-based violence for women and girls, reports suggest.
A 2021 systematic review, published in BMJ Global Health, looked at studies on violence against women and girls during natural disasters, and found that “post-disaster environments often heightened risks”. For example, “the lack of doors, walls and locks in displacement camps heightened violence against women and girls in Haiti, Japan and Nepal”. It also suggested that failures by law enforcement enabled violence in emergency shelters.
Last year a project by the UN development programme, Enabling Gender-Responsive Disaster Recovery, Climate and Environmental Resilience in the Caribbean, focused on embedding gender equality and human rights in climate resilience and disaster recovery across nine Caribbean countries. It recommended broader regional scaling, sustained technical and financial support and stronger knowledge-sharing systems.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has been working to address the challenges faced by women and girls in emergency shelters, says Loyce Pace, its Americas regional director. The organisation publishes manuals providing guidance to agencies working on the ground during natural disasters.
Pace says such guidance may take the form of “diplomatic engagements or advocacy, ensuring [national] governments understand the role that they should be playing or could be playing in emergencies, and that they have access to the resources or people or places they need to be most supportive of their communities”.
“In emergencies in general, we find that women and children are particularly vulnerable. And it’s largely because they’re one of the populations that are often either left behind or not considered in terms of their particular needs, or even worse, they’re exposed to worse conditions and thus have poorer outcomes,” she says.
Pace believes the Caribbean has attained an acceptable standard in implementing adequate provisions for women and girls in emergency shelters. “[However] as with any organisation, particularly one that works with volunteers, it requires constant training and reminders for the volunteers in charge in these communities to keep an eye out for any place that is not quite meeting these standards,” she says.
Those provisions include safe, private sleeping quarters and bathroom facilities, as well as menstrual hygiene products.
The managing director of the Disaster Risk Management Authority in the Bahamas, Aarone Sargent, says every effort is being made to ensure emergency shelters are safe and comfortable. Safety, he says, is under the purview of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force and government social services, “and they provide excellent service to the evacuees”.
Yet a pressing concern for disaster relief in the Bahamas is ensuring that enough shelters are available and that they meet acceptable standards, and Sargent acknowledges that the country has shelter accommodation for only 3% of its population.
In the most recent emergency evacuation for a hurricane, during last year’s Hurricane Melissa, about 1,800 people from the Bahamas’ southern islands were evacuated to the island of New Providence farther north and were accommodated in six or seven shelters, while others made alternative arrangements to stay with family or at hotels, he says.
“We are working on building out and increasing that capacity throughout those islands that are prone to natural hazard events, whether it’s wildfires or hurricanes,” Sargent says. “So our goal over the next five to 10 years is to build out another 10 to 15 shelters that have the capacity to house about 20% of our population.”
As in St Vincent and the Grenadines and much of the region, the Bahamas’ emergency shelter stock consists mainly of privately owned facilities designated as safe places in the event of a natural disaster. Many are decades old and not built with access for vulnerable populations in mind, nor for the particular gender challenges presented by mass evacuations.
Sargent acknowledges that the infrastructure for people with disabilities is also “a work in progress”. “For future shelters, we will ensure that they are accessible to all residents, no matter what their impediment or disability may be.”
Yet vulnerability can persist after people leave the shelters. Pace says that for women the recovery phase is often the most challenging. “We’ve done a very good job in terms of the immediate response, ensuring that we’re paying attention to these special populations in the acute phase of an emergency.” But she says that people in vulnerable situations can struggle more “to get a loan or to feel safe as a business owner, especially if you are a single woman”.
Since leaving the shelter, it has taken Alexander a long time to regain some sense of stability. Her home and livelihood were destroyed in the hurricane, and she is living without electricity or water. “When I left Ashton and came to see my home, my head and feet started to shake,” she says. “Only recently, I stopped feeling like the floor was shaking.”
