HURRICANE Dorian has trapped hundreds of people on an American island after sweeping through the Bahamas and up the east coast of the US.
Two hundred people are feared to have died as the storm surged through the Caribbean islands towards Florida.
Yesterday its path took it up the coast through to North Carolina leaving 800 people stranded on the island of Ocracoke.
The weather system is set to keep moving north, clipping Nova Scotia, Cananda, before veering eastwards with remnants of it destined to hit the UK.
Steve Harris, who has lived on Ocracoke Island for the last 19 years, said he’d never seen a storm bring such devastation to his community
The semi-retired contractor has ridden out eight hurricanes on the island, which is only accessible only by boat or air.
He said: “We just thought it was gonna be a normal blow but the damage is going to be severe this time. This is flooding of biblical proportions.”
North Carolina Governor, Roy Cooper, said about 800 people had remained on the island to wait out Dorian.
The storm made landfall yesterday morning over North Carolina’s Outer Banks as a far weaker storm than the monster that devastated the Bahamas.
Yet despite having been downgraded to a Category 1 storm, it still sent seawater surging over neighbourhoods, flooding the first floors of many homes.
“There is significant concern about hundreds of people trapped on Ocracoke Island,” Cooper said.
The U.S. Coast Guard began landing local police officers on the island on Friday via helicopter and airlifting out the sick, elderly and others in distress.
Dorian is expected to remain a hurricane as it sweeps up the Eastern Seaboard today.
The chaos the storm left in its wake was brought to the fore yesterday as it was claimed survivors in the Bahamas were “looting and shooting each other for food”.
The 225mph megastorm bought near-total devastation to the Abaco Islands, with eyewitnesses saying the area “smells of death” with corpses floating in the water.
Homes left flattened by 225mph Hurricane Dorian are seen on Abaco, Bahamas[/caption]
Tearful survivor Alicia Cooke wept: “Everything is gone, people are starting to panic. Pillaging, looting, trying to shoot people for food and water. It’s just no way everyone’s going to get out.”
“No homes. No banks. No gas stations. No hardware stores. Everything is gone”.
The death toll officially sits at 30 but officials expected that to rise dramatically over the coming days.
Last night Health Minister Duane Sands warned of a “staggering” final number.
“The public needs to prepare for unimaginable information about the death toll and the human suffering,” he told local radio.
On social media thousands are still listed as missing as British and American rescue teams hunt through the rubble for survivors.
People are also using websites such as DorianPeopleSearch.com, which currently lists the names of more than 5,500 missing people.
THOUSANDS MISSING
Speaking to the Daily Beast, the site’s founder Vanessa Pritchard-Ansell said: “When you see that somebody has been found and their family knows where they are, you feel a moment of elation.”
“But you also know that there are so many thousands of others who have not been accounted for.”
In grim development officials in the Bahamas have deployed a team of morticians loaded with body bags to the Abaco Islands, the BBC reports.
Chilling pictures taken there over the past 36 hours show the catastrophic damage caused to thousands of homes.
The wooden-built properties were completely shredded as the mega-storm bulldozed towns and villages, ripping up trees and felling power lines.
At least 30 people are reported to have died in the shocking mega-storm[/caption]
The storm’s punishing winds and shocking floodwaters destroyed or severely damaged homes, crippled hospitals and trapped people in attics.
Terrifying time-lapse footage has now emerged which shows the killer storm barrelling across the Atlantic and over the Bahamas before heading towards the US coast.
Mark Lowcock, the United Nations’ under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, estimates about 70,000 people in the northern Bahamas now need vital help.
However, with no functioning water systems in accessible areas, workers had not been able to establish a permanent rescue site on the Abacos.
How hurricanes are measured
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale is based on a hurricane’s sustained wind speed.
- A Category 1 storm has sustained winds of 74-95 mph
- A Category 2 storm has sustained winds of 96-110 mph
- A Category 3 storm has sustained winds of 111-129 mph
- A Category 4 storm has sustained winds of 130-156mph
- A Category 5 storm has sustained winds of 156mph+
Lia Head-Rigby, who helps run a local hurricane relief group and flew over the Bahamas’ hard-hit Abaco Islands, said: “It’s total devastation. It’s decimated. Apocalyptic.
“It’s not rebuilding something that was there – we have to start again.”
She said her representative on Abaco told her there were “a lot more dead,” though she had no numbers as bodies are being gathered.
The Bahamas’ prime minister also expected more deaths and predicted that rebuilding would require “a massive, coordinated effort”.
Hubert Minnis said: “We are in the midst of one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history. No effort or resources will be held back.”
BRITS LENDING HAND
Volunteers from British disaster response charity Team Rubicon UK are in the Bahamas to help some of the 76,000 people worst affected by Dorian.
They will use their specialist military backgrounds to get aid to the most cut-off communities.
Paul Taylor, Team Rubicon UK Operations Response Manager and an Afghanistan veteran, said: “Where Team Rubicon UK can help, we will – but we need support from the public to do so, so we’d appreciate if people could spare a few pounds.”
Earlier five Coast Guard helicopters ran near-hourly flights to the stricken Abaco, flying more than 20 injured people to the capital’s main hospital.
The British Royal navy is also rushing in aid, while the UK Government sent in a team of humanitarian experts to offer their help.
A few private aid groups also tried to reach the battered islands in the northern Bahamas.
Tammy Mitchell of the Bahamas’ National Emergency Management Agency told ZNS Bahamas radio station: “We don’t want people thinking we’ve forgotten them. … We know what your conditions are.”
But with airports flooded and roads impassable, desperate rescue efforts are being severely hampered.
Locals rescued used jet skis and bulldozers as they were forced to improvise to reach those trapped.
The news is sure to send shivers down the spines of those hunkering down in the US.
Dorian sideswiped the Carolinas with shrieking winds, tornadoes and sideways rain on Thursday as it closed in for a possible direct hit on the dangerously exposed Outer Banks.
At least four deaths in the Southeast were blamed on the storm.
One dad was forced to fling his son onto a roof to save him from sharks that had swum inland after Hurricane Dorian decimated the Bahamas.
Adrian Farrington was trying frantically to save his son from the predators in Murphy Town on the island of Abaco and thought he’d succeeded only for the howling winds to sweep away his boy back into the shark infested in the flood waters.
He recalled how his five-year-old, Adrian Jr, was reaching up and calling out “Daddy” as the winds blew him away.
The 38-year-old told the Nassau Guardian: ‘I still could remember him reaching for me and calling, “Daddy,”
Adrian had thought his boy would be safer out of the water after spotting a shark beneath the waves so flung him onto a nearby roof.
He then tried to make his way to his son, Adrian Jr, but before he could sit down ‘to hold him,’ the hurricane ‘dragged him across the roof back into the surge.’
Twisters spun off by Dorian peeled away roofs and flipped trailers, and more than 250,000 homes and businesses were left without power as the hurricane pushed north along the coastline, its winds weakening to 105mph by evening.
Trees and power lines littered flooded streets in Charleston’s historic downtown. Gusts topped 80mph in some areas.
The damage from the same storm that mauled the Bahamas was mercifully light in many parts of South Carolina and Georgia as well, and by mid-afternoon many of the 1.5 million people who had been told to evacuate in three states were allowed to return.
Still, forecasters warned that Dorian could run straight over North Carolina’s Outer Banks the thin line of islands that stick out from the US coast.
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To the north, Virginia was also in harm’s way, and a round of evacuations was ordered there.
“We have a long night ahead of us. Everyone needs to stay in a safe place and off the roads until the storm passes,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said.
The Category 2 vortex began creeping up the shore 95 miles off Cape Canaveral on Tuesday.
In Florida, Walt Disney World closed its four theme parks by mid-afternoon on Tuesday amid fears for tourist safety.
Tens of thousands now need vital help in the north of the Bahamas[/caption]
Aerial photos show the debris and destruction left in the wake of the hurricane[/caption]
Matthew Aylen is rescued from a flooded home in Freeport, Bahamas[/caption]
Mobile homes are upended and debris is strewn about at the Holiday Trav-l Park in North Carolina[/caption]
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