‘Unprecedented’ Hurricane Dorian pounds the Bahamas

At least five people have died after Hurricane Dorian pounded away at the Bahamas for a day and a half.

The catastrophic onslaught sent floodwaters up to the second floors of some buildings, trapped people in attics and led to others fleeing from one shelter to another.

The Grand Bahama airport was said to be under 6ft of water.

As of daybreak on Tuesday, Dorian’s winds had dipped to 120mph, making it a still highly dangerous Category 3 hurricane. The storm was at a standstill, with part of its eyewall having hung over Grand Bahama Island since Sunday night.

Hurricane-force winds extended out as far as 45mph in some directions.

The Bahamas’ prime minister Hubert Minnis said: “We are in the midst of a historic tragedy. The devastation is unprecedented and extensive.”

Health minister Duane Sands said flooding has rendered the main hospital on Grand Bahama unusable.

He said the main hospital in Marsh Harbour is intact and sheltering 400 people but needs food, water, medicine and surgical supplies.

United Nations officials estimate more than 60,000 people in the north-west Bahamas will need food following the devastation left by the hurricane.

The UN World Food Programme said a team is ready to help the Bahamian government assess storm damage and prioritise needs. Its preliminary calculations show that 45,700 people in Grand Bahama island may need food, along with another 14,500 in the Abaco islands.

Dorian is expected to approach the Florida coast later on Tuesday, but the threat to the state has eased significantly, with the National Hurricane Centre’s projected track showing most of the coast falling outside the cone of potential landfall.

No place in Florida has more than an 8% chance of getting hit by hurricane-force winds, the service said.

Over the long Labour Day holiday weekend in the US, hundreds of thousands of people in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina – more than 800,000 in South Carolina alone – were ordered to evacuate amid fears Dorian could bring life-threatening storm-surge flooding even if the hurricane’s centre stays offshore, as forecast.

Several large airports announced closures, and hundreds of flights were cancelled.

The US Coast Guard airlifted at least 21 people who were injured on Abaco Island, which Dorian hit on Sunday with sustained winds of 185mph and gusts of up to 220mph, a strength matched only by the Labour Day hurricane of 1935, before storms were given names.

Bahamian officials said they received a “tremendous” number of calls from people in flooded homes.

One radio station said it fielded more than 2,000 distress messages, including reports of a five-month-old baby stranded on a roof and a woman with six grandchildren who cut a hole in a roof to escape rising floodwaters. At least two designated storm shelters flooded.

Dorian was blamed for one death in Puerto Rico at the start of its path through the Caribbean.

Parliament member Iram Lewis said he feared that waters would keep rising and stranded people would lose contact with officials as mobile phone batteries died.

“It is scary,” he said, adding that people were moving from one shelter to another as floodwaters kept surging. “We’re definitely in dire straits.”

While it is expected to stay offshore, meteorologist Daniel Brown cautioned that “only a small deviation” could draw the storm’s dangerous core toward land.

In South Carolina, the major Interstate 26 road was turned into a one-way evacuation route away from Charleston on the coast, and Georgia governor Brian Kemp likewise planned to reverse lanes on I-16 on Tuesday to increase the flow of traffic away from the danger zone.

Mr Kemp said: “We’re taking the ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude.”