NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans real estate developer and serial entrepreneur Sydney Torres said video messages from friends in the Bahamas are hard to watch.
Torres just returned home from the Bahamas Saturday night, hours before Hurricane Dorian struck the islands with 185 mph winds.
"It's there and it's created a lot of damage," Torres said.
Torres is currently developing his second project on Eleuthera Island, east of Nassau.
"Some dear friends of my who helped me build the Cove, my first resort, have been calling out, crying for help," Torres said.
Torres showed WWL-TV some of the videos. One narrated by a young mother showed the devastation in her apartment complex.
"Pray for Abaco, I'm begging you, my baby's on the floor, please pray for us, I'm begging you, please pray for us," the woman said. "The apartment building we stay in, the whole roof came off."
In another video, a woman said, "We're stuck in the building, the water is about a story high and we cannot come out of the building. Please, we're barely getting services, we have kids up here, we can't move, we can't go nowhere."
"(With) 180 mile per hour winds, and you can see from the videos that I'm just posting from friends I'm getting, they're holding on to rails, crying, children in the background, crying," Torres said.
Torres is already mounting a relief effort. He plans to fill a cargo plane with food and water and fly it to the Bahamas as soon as he gets clearance from the government there.
"I'm already using cargo planes to build my new project," Torres said. "We're already in production with the new project. It makes it really easy. We already have them under contract."
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Torres says the food will be boxed up and ready to feed a family of three to four, for up to four days.
"It's really hard to see this because these individuals live a very simple life, a very happy life," Torres said.
He hopes to have help on the ground in the Bahamas as soon as possible.
Torres backed similar cargo plane relief efforts in recent years after natural disasters in Haiti and Puerto Rico.