Hurricane Dorian heads for Florida, leaving ruins in parts of Bahamas

MARSH HARBOUR (Bahamas): Hurricane Dorian smashed parts of the tourism-dependent Bahamas to ruins, leaving relief officials scrambling on Tuesday to battle an unfolding humanitarian crisis as the scale of the catastrophe begins to emerge.
Aerial video of the Bahamas’ Great Abaco Island revealed mile upon mile of flooded neighborhoods, pulverized buildings, upturned boats and shipping containers scattered like Lego toys.
Many buildings had walls or roofs partly ripped off.
While Dorian’s winds had diminished to a Category 2 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale, the hurricane expanded in size and picked up speed.
Forecasters said it would come dangerously close in the next 36 hours to Florida’s east coast, where more than a million people have been ordered evacuated.
Bahamas Prime Minister Hubert Minnis put the death toll at seven. “We can expect more deaths to be recorded. This is just preliminary information,” Minnis told a news conference. “Marsh Harbor has suffered, I would estimate, in excess of 60 percent damage to their homes,” Minnis said, referring to the port on Great Abaco.
“The Mud, as we know, has been completely destroyed or decimated,” he said in reference to a shantytown known as the Mud and the Peas.
“Victims are being loaded on flatbed trucks across Abaco,” said one Twitter poster with the handle @mvp242, describing a rain-blurred photograph of limp bodies strewn across a truck bed. Other Twitter messages said whole communities were swept away.
Minnis said he saw people waving for help in a community near Coopers Town on Great Abaco, after it was cut off by floods.
“There were around 30 people trapped and waving yellow flags, sheets and shirts to bring our attention to their survival.”
A video posted on Twitter showed a storm surge rising up inside a two-story home, the sofa and other furniture floating toward the second floor. Another showed residents trying to swim from one home to another through the surge.
In another, a woman repeatedly says, “Please pray for us,” after the storm ripped the roof off her apartment building, exposing her, and other residents, to the elements as she struggled to shelter her 4-month-old baby.
“Some people the water just sucked them,” she said. “Some people didn’t make it.” Reports from Grand Bahama island, and its main town of Freeport, have been more sketchy. The weather has made it impossible for relief agencies to get through, Minnis said.
The Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center said storm surges in Grand Bahama were 12 to 18 feet (3.7 to 5.5 m) above normal tide levels. (Reuters)