As the extent of the devastation from hurricane Dorian begins to emerge in the Bahamas, anxious relatives here in the Atlantic region waited for word from their loved ones.
Sky Buble of Halifax has family throughout the islands, including his father on Grand Bahama, which was particularly hard hit by the monster storm.
“I actually haven’t been able to speak to my family in Grand Bahama since midday yesterday,” Buble said Tuesday afternoon. “I spoke to them then when the storm was just picking up. So I tried to call my dad at his house and it doesn’t even (go through).”
He’s been in touch with relatives in the capital Nassau on the island of New Providence, which escaped the worst of the storm. But communications even among the islands is difficult.
“It’s hard to know what’s going on,” he said. “You try to get information that you can. I’ve been trying to follow the news stations. The flooding is very high. There’s no doubt that my dad’s house is flooded and with the wind, the roof can come off, a lot of shingles flying around, trees can end up blowing around, and the other infrastructure. So it’s a lot that can happen but No. 1, I just want to hear that they’re safe.”
Buble said there are many Bahamians in Halifax and that’s helped.
“There’s definitely a community here.”
He encouraged people to support the rebuilding effort effort by donating to a GoFundMe fundraiser called Help from Halifax: Rebuilding Bahamas After Dorian.
Dorian likely will arrive as a post-tropical storm between the Atlantic coast and Sable Island on the weekend, said SaltWire meteorologist Cindy Day in her forecast on Tuesday.
“The leading edge of that will bring wind and rain on Saturday, improving conditions pretty quickly on Sunday behind the low pressure system,” she said.
If the system interacts with a trough forecast over the Great Lakes, that could push the storm more toward the Bay of Fundy and intensify the system’s rain and wind effects.
“We’ll watch the track but most of the computer models are in agreement with this system tracking between the Atlantic coast and Sable Island on Saturday into Sunday morning, making its way towards the south coast regions of Newfoundland by Sunday afternoon and evening as a very weakened low pressure system,” Day said.
The slow-moving hurricane — Day said its forward motion Tuesday afternoon was about two kilometres per hour so it was essentially stalled — will go down in history as one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record. The winds were estimated at 295 km/h when it landed in the Bahamas on Monday.
Dorian has been pounding the Bahamas for days, killing at least five people in the Abaco Islands in the northern Bahamas, PostMedia news reported Tuesday.
A deluge of more than 700 millimetres of rain has inundated Bahamian homes with floodwater ahead of its expected advance on the U.S. coast, where more than a million people have been ordered evacuated.
Halifax-based energy company Emera provides power in the Bahamas through subsidiaries including the Grand Bahama Power Company. An Emera spokesman said Tuesday that restoration teams are assembling in Florida “and together they will be preparing for mobilization to Grand Bahama as quickly and as safely as possible.
“Our immediate focus is ensuring the safety of our employees and their families,” Jeff Myrick said in an email.
Myrick said the company is drawing on expertise and resources from across Emera in its response. “This includes experienced teams from Emera Caribbean, Nova Scotia Power, Tampa Electric and Emera Maine who have prior hurricane response experience.
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