When Hurricane Dorian blew through the Bahamas, it exposed one of the world’s great faultlines of inequality

BAKERS BAY, The Bahamas — Here in one of the Bahamas’ most exclusive communities, the celebrity homeowners arrived in private jets. The cooks and cleaners and construction workers caught the ferry from the Mudd.

The Mudd, home to many workers at Baker’s Bay, was flattened. 

The Mudd, in Marsh Harbour on Great Abaco Island, was an informal settlement, built with abandoned construction materials on low-lying, flood-prone ground, ravaged periodically by fires. It was an open secret: The rich and famous here were served by — relied on — the residents of what the Bahamian government called “an unregulated community.”

For years, wealthy visitors to Baker’s Bay could ignore the precarious living conditions in the Mudd. But now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, that’s no longer possible. The shantytown has been destroyed. Many people were killed; the rest are homeless. The devastating human toll has exposed an economic dependency — there’s no one to repair the mansions.

Read the story from The Washington Post by Kevin Seiff - “When Hurricane Dorian blew through the Bahamas, it exposed one of the world’s great faultlines of inequality.”