As the waters begin to fall, the corpses emerge in the Bahamas. This happened two years ago with Hurricane Harvey in Texas, 12 years ago with Katrina in New Orleans, and now with this former British colony, one of those Caribbean paradises, facing a huge disaster. The official death toll as a result of Cyclone Dorian is in the thirties, but the Government warns that the final balance will be "shocking" and that the number of missing in the most scourged islands are counted by "hundreds, even thousands." Now turned into a storm, Dorian attacks the United States.
The cyclone was primed with the northwestern islands of the Caribbean for two eternal days for a population accustomed to the storms of the time, but had not seen in recent history such a powerful cyclone. He played Bahamas on Sunday with category 5, the maximum on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which classifies these phenomena, which means winds of at least 252 kilometers. It wiped out the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama, with some 70,000 residents, and destroyed about 45% of homes, according to figures provided by the Red Cross.
The aid has begun to reach the area. Also lots of mortuary bags. "The public must begin to prepare for unimaginable information on death and human suffering figures," Bahamas Health Minister Duane Sands said in a statement to Guardian Radio 96.9 collected by CNN television. Before, the director general of Tourism and Minister of Transportation, Joy Jibrilu, had already warned that "literally hundreds, even thousands of people are still missing."
The aerial images showed a devastated landscape where the collective imaginary places a dreamlike place. Abaco is made up of two islands and multiple keys essentially dedicated to fishing and with only 13,000 inhabitants, among which is a large number of Haitian refugees from their own natural disasters. Grand Bahama, with 52,000 inhabitants, is a tourist enclave and houses the second largest city of the archipelago, Freeport.
Citizens mobilize to try to find their loved ones, largely through social networks. A website, DorianPeopleSearch.com, was created on Sunday to put in contact those people who know nothing about others since the weekend and have multiplied searches through Facebook. At the same time, fear spreads. "You smell the bodies decomposing as you walk through Marsh Harbor (one of the cities of Abacus)," Sandra Sweeting, 37, said in an interview with AFP.
The Spanish chef José Andrés, displaced to the area with his World Central Kitchen food aid organization, which plans to distribute 20,000 meals a day, described what he saw by telephone to this newspaper. "The destruction is everywhere, the roads have been swept away and the boats have been driven out of the water, a water that now covers everything, even the houses."
One of the most virulent cyclones
Meteorologists have confirmed that Dorian is moving north and will enter the State of Massachusetts earlier this Saturday. This is the second most violent hurricane since there are records, in 1950, at the same level as two others in 1988 and 2005 due to the maximum speed of its winds, with peaks of 295 kilometers recorded on Sunday. The record corresponds to Allen, who in 1980 reached 305 kilometers per hour, according to AFP data.
Dorian is the fifth hurricane category 5 since 2016. Between 2003 and 2007 there were eight, including Katrina. "Our climate models increasingly anticipate category 4 or 5 hurricanes as the weather warms," Kristy Dahl of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an American NGO, told AFP.
The effect that Dorian has caused in the Bahamas parallels the damage that Harvey caused to Houston in 2017, when a huge mass of rain was stuck above the city for days and left thousands of homes flooded. In four days, 72,000 million liters of water fell. Dorian's balance is still uncertain.
The testimonies collected by news agencies on the ground are terrifying. A local radio station received more than 2,000 calls with help messages. One begged for help for a five-month-old boy trapped with his mother on a roof. A hole in the roof saved the life of a grandmother and six of her grandchildren after flooding her home.
The Bahamas is richer and more developed than other Caribbean archipelagos, but the scourge of a hurricane of that magnitude for two days, concentrated at the same point, has destroyed many of its infrastructure, such as medical centers, which exacerbates the difficulties. On Friday morning he touched down in the United States, already very weak, in category 1, but still capable of destruction. Dorian chose Cape Hatteras as the land point where to land, exactly the same place that the Wright brothers used to make the first successful and sustained flights at the beginning of the 20th century and thus provide the State of North Carolina with the nickname of “first in flying. "
According to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the cyclone was moving with winds of 150 kilometers per hour and a slow weakening was expected in the coming days. The storm unleashed several tornadoes in the southeastern United States that reduced some homes to rubble, but did not produce fatalities. However, at least five people have died in the US as a result of preparations to confront Dorian. These are men in Florida or North Carolina who died from falls or electrocuted while cutting trees or preparing their homes to protect them from disaster.
The majority of the coastal residents of the States affected by the Dorian pass complied with evacuation orders while those who were too old to leave their homes or were afraid to do so decided to resist the assault of nature by protecting their homes with planks. and taking refuge in safe areas.
"We were prepared for the worst and that has not happened," a neighbor of Wilmington (North Carolina), Ross Page, told the Associated Press while walking his dogs this morning. In the Bahamas they have assumed that they face the worst, but they still do not even know what the magnitude of that disaster is.
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