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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 neighbourhoods, pulverised 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,” Mr Minnis told a news conference. Marsh Harbor has suffered, I would estimate, in excess of 60 per cent damage to their homes,” Mr 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.            
         Dorian, which killed one person in Puerto Rico before striking the Bahamas on Sunday, is tied for the second-strongest Atlantic storm to make landfall with Gilbert (1988), Wilma (2005) and the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.  It was expected to hit Florida with hurricane conditions overnight, before bringing its powerful winds and dangerous surf along the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina by late on Thursday. The governors of those states have ordered evacuations of coastal counties. President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency for South Carolina on Tuesday, freeing funds, other federal resources and manpower to assist during the storm and aftermath recovery. Emergencies have already been declared in Florida and Georgia.(NAN)

Birds eye view of the devastation in Abaco,Bahamas #HurricaneDorian2019 #dorianbahamas pic.twitter.com/pg84sEYHHA

— MVP (@mvp242) September 3, 2019