Bahamas gauges disaster as death toll mounts,

Storm pummeled islands, taking lives, wrecking infrastructure, flooding whole neighborhoods.

NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Houses torn open. Cars, boats and heavy equipment tossed and crumpled. Whole communities flooded, and flattened. Roads turned to rivers. Communications in ruins and basic infrastructure — including shelters, hospitals and public buildings — under water. Seven are dead, according to the official count, and the toll was expected to climb.

The government in this nation of 400,000 sounded the all-clear from Hurricane Dorian on Wednesday morning, lifting the tropical storm warning for Grand Bahama, the Abacos, Bimini and other battered islands.

As the storm, which spent a devastating 40 hours parked over the archipelago, finally lurched onward to the United States, the full scope of the destruction became clearer.

Entire neighborhoods were reduced to unrecognizable fields of rubble. At least 60% of houses in Marsh Harbour were lost or damaged. Video clips have shown waves crashing into second-floor windows and the airport underwater.

“We are in the midst of one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history,” Bahamas Prime Minister Hubert Minnis told a news conference. “No effort or resources will be held back.”

The islands in the northwestern Bahamas that were hit the hardest — the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama — are 30 feet at their highest point, and the storm surge reached up to 23 feet, not counting the waves, said Joel Cline, the Tropical Program Coordinator at NOAA.

Photographs from flights over Abaco show trees sheared of limbs and leaves and saltwater ponds covering swaths of land where homes once stood. Some houses had their roofs ripped completely off, while others were reduced to piles of debris mired in water.

Rescue efforts

Rescue crews fanned out Wednesday across the landscape of smashed and flooded homes, trying to reach stranded victims in stricken areas where emergency workers had yet to reach.

The U.S. Coast Guard, Britain’s Royal Navy and relief organizations including the United Nations and the Red Cross joined the burgeoning effort to rush food and medicine to survivors and lift the most desperate people to safety by helicopter.

A day earlier, U.S. government helicopter crews — mainly from the Coast Guard but also from Customs and Border Protection — conducted evacuation missions on Abaco. The Coast Guard also provided the prime minister and Bahamas emergency management officials with their first flyover to assess the damages.

The Bahamian government sent hundreds of police officers and marines into the stricken islands, along with doctors, nurses and other health care workers.

“Right now there are just a lot of unknowns,” Parliament member Iram Lewis said. “We need help.”