Airports were flooded and roads impassable after the most powerful storm to hit the Bahamas in recorded history parked over Abaco and Grand Bahama islands, pounding them with winds up to 295km/h and torrential rain before finally moving into open waters on a course towards Florida. People on the US coast made final preparations for a storm with winds at a still-dangerous 175km/h, making it a Category 2 storm.
Rescuers trying to reach drenched and stunned victims of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas fanned out across a blasted landscape of smashed and flooded homes on Wednesday, while disaster relief organisations rushed to bring in food and medicine.The official death toll stood at seven but was certain to rise.
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An aerial photo shows the aftermath of the Hurricane Dorian damage over an unspecified location in the Bahamas [Handout/Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater/US Coast Guard/Reuters]
The full magnitude of the crisis in the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama was still coming into focus, with rescue crews yet to reach some of the hardest-hit areas. “Right now there are just a lot of unknowns,” Parliament member Iram Lewis said in Grand Bahama in the wake of the most powerful hurricane on record ever to hit the country. “We need help.”
Volunteers rescue several families that arrived on small boats, from the rising waters of Hurricane Dorian, near the Casuarina bridge in Freeport, Grand Bahama [aljazeera]Some storm victims remained on rooftops, awaiting rescue, according to media reports early on Wednesday. Dorian, meanwhile, pushed its way northward off the Florida shoreline with reduced but still-dangerous 175km/h) winds on a projected course that could sideswipe Georgia, as well as North and South Carolina. An estimated three million people in the four states were warned to evacuate. The storm mauled the Bahamas for over a day and a half with winds up to 185 mph (295km/h) and torrential rains, swamping neighbourhoods in muddy brown floodwaters and destroying or severely damaging thousands of homes.An aerial view of a row of damaged structures seen from a US Coast Guard aircraft in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, in the Bahamas [Handout/Adam Stanton/US Coast Guard Atlantic Area/Reuters/aljazeera]Josh Morgerman, who went to the Great Abaco Island on August 31, said Dorian was the most intense storm he had experienced in three decades of chasing hurricanes.”Thought I was playing it safe by riding it out in a solid-concrete school on a hill in Marsh Harbour,” he tweeted. “Thought wrong … Winds pounded the building with the force of a thousand sledgehammers.”When the storm’s eye passed over the island, Morgerman said he fled to a better-built government building that he found filled with others who had escaped collapsed houses.Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said the Bahamas is “in the midst of one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history”.He said he expects the number of dead to rise.
‘Get out’
At 8am (12:00 GMT) on Wednesday, Dorian was centred about 95 miles (144km) northeast of Daytona Beach, Florida, moving northwest at eight mph (13km/h). Hurricane-force winds extended up to 60 miles (95km) from its centre.
Dorian was expected to pass dangerously close to Georgia and perhaps strike South Carolina or North Carolina on Thursday or Friday with the potential for more than a metre of rain in some spots. The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm is likely to cause storm surge and severe flooding even if the hurricane’s core does not blow ashore.
“Don’t tough it out. Get out,” said US Federal Emergency Management Agency official Carlos Castillo.
