Hurricane Dorian’s deadly trail
Hurricane Dorian left a trail of devastation in its wake in the Caribbean – and the death toll is expected to rise steeply
THE monster storm approached with menacing slowness and when it arrived, it dug in. For two days Hurricane Dorian smashed into the northern Bahamas with winds of up to 300km/h. By the time the category 5 hurricane – the strongest on record in the area – had edged away from the stricken Caribbean islands, morticians and body bags were being brought in as the country began to count the cost of the tragedy.
The island of Great Abaco, best known as a yachtsman’s paradise, has been virtually wiped out. There’s no electricity, no water, no food and no medicine – and bodies were piling up in the storm’s aftermath. The army also had to move in to prevent looting.
Whole neighbourhoods were wiped out in what Bahamian prime minister Hubert Minnis described as a “historic tragedy”.
The International Red Cross estimates 45% of homes on Grand Bahama and the Abacos islands – a total of about 13 000 properties – were severely damaged or destroyed.
Mark Green, head of the US Agency for International Development (USaid) who observed the damage to the islands from a plane, told Reuters news agency it was “almost as though nuclear bombs had been dropped on them”.
ALONG with the destruction came tales of unbearable human suffering.
Grief-stricken father Adrian Farrington of Murphy Town on the island of Abaco told The Times he treaded water for more than an hour after floods had swept his family from their home.
After seeing fins in the water, he’d manoeuvred his five-year-old son onto the roof to escape the sharks – only to watch him being snatched away by the wind.
“Before I could sit there to hold him, a gust from the hurricane dragged him across the roof back into the surge.”
Sarah St George, chairperson of the Grand Bahama Port Authority, told The Guardian how the water was coming up to the second floor of houses on the north side of the island.
“My assistant, Tammy, was on the roof of her house for 30 hours, hanging on to a coconut tree with her eight-year-old
daughter, Ariana. Her grandmother lost her grip and slipped off the roof and drowned. There was no way of getting to them. They’ve lost everything.”
A huge aid effort is under way, with planes and helicopters bringing in supplies to help the estimated 76 000 people in need of food and shelter.
As the storm moved away from the once-glittering archipelago, it chugged its way northeast towards the eastern US seaboard, and was downgraded to a category 2 hurricane.
An estimated three million people in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas were warned to evacuate.
At the time of going to print the official death toll in the Bahamas stood at 44, but it was expected to rise dramatically as hundreds were still missing.
Health minister Duane Sands told local radio, “The public needs to prepare for unimaginable information about the death toll and the human suffering.”
‘A gust from the hurricane dragged him across the roof’