"Unprecedented damage" done to the Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian, says Prime Minister Hubert Minnis

Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis of The Bahamas said on Monday morning that Hurricane Dorian appears to have caused unprecedented devastation to his country.

The storm, the second-strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, remains extremely dangerous.

According to the International Red Cross, 13,000 houses are feared damaged or destroyed,

Pictures showed surging floodwaters, upturned cars and snapped trees.

Dorian is the most powerful storm to hit the Bahamas since records began. Forecasters say it will later move dangerously close to the US east coast.

The US National Hurricane Center, in its latest update, says Dorain hit the Bahamas as a category five hurricane but has now weakened to category four, with maximum sustained winds near 155 miles per hour. 

Regional response

There are already unconfirmed reports of casualties in The Bahamas caused by the hurricane’s passage.

Ronald Jackson, Executive Director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), told RJR News that there were unconfirmed reports of two deaths.

Revealing that CDEMA had not received any official notification from the Bahamian Government on casualties, he said “we have had from points on the ground earlier, indications of, I think, one or two casualties.”

It was important to await confirmation from the government, though, he stressed.

He added that there was still no access to Abaco and Grand Bahama, so CDEMA has had to develop a “provisional needs list,” based on a number of considerations: “the population that’s there, the type of housing and infrastructure, the vulnerable population that is there.”

That list will be “fine-tuned,” he said, “as soon as the rapid needs assessment team can get set foot on those islands, which we are hoping will be sometime early tomorrow, but at the speed at which the storm is going, that may be a little bit later than earlier.”