Sep. 2--WASHINGTON -- Dorian was pummelling the Bahamas on Monday, with its powerful winds ripping the roofs off homes and toppling trees as a storm surge brought intense flooding to parts of the Caribbean island chain.
Dorian made landfall on the Abaco islands, in the northern Bahamas, on Sunday. The slow-moving, Category 5 storm has crept over the country for the past day, knocking out some power and communications, as it crawls northward toward the mainland United States.
Video posted by residents on social media showed downed telephone poles, cars flipped over and massive waves crashing ashore in heavy rain.
Hope Town Volunteer Fire and Rescue group wrote on Facebook that "catastrophic damage" occurred in several locations on the Abaco islands.
"I don't think anyone expected a hurricane of this intensity ... this is extreme," Joy Jibrilu, director general of the Bahamas' Ministry of Tourism, told CBS News.
The full extent of the damage would only be known once Dorian moves off the Bahamas, she said. In an advisory on Monday morning, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said Dorian's maximum sustained winds of 270 kilometres per hour were having a "devastating" impact on Grand Bahama island, the northernmost island of the Bahamas.
It warned that rising water moving inland from the coast over the next 36 hours poses a life-threatening danger.
A British Royal Navy auxiliary ship, RFA Mounts Bay, was due to arrive in the Bahamas on Monday bringing supplies and specialized equipment. The Bahamas is an independent country within the British Commonwealth.
Dorian was forecast to continue lashing the Bahamas over the course of Monday as it makes its way towards the south-eastern United States. ___ (c)2019 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany)
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