After lingering over the Bahamas for 48 hours, the death toll from Hurricane Dorian is rising. Speaking to CNN, Bahamas fisherman Howard Armstrong recalled the tragic moment his wife drowned in front of him as their home was engulfed in flood water. Currently, the death toll in the Bahamas is at seven and expected to rise.
“We were doing all right until the water kept coming up, and all the appliances were going around the house, like the washer machine,” Armstrong, a crab fisherman, recalled.
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Armstrong went on to explain that his wife, Lynn, was suffering from hypothermia and had been standing on top of the kitchen cabinets, one of the only spots in their home where they could keep their heads above the water. Eventually, however, the cabinets “disintegrated,” causing Lynn to slip beneath the surface.
“I kept with her, and she just drowned on me,” Armstrong said.
The rising water eventually forced Armstrong to flee the home. Surprisingly, his 40-foot fishing boat was still moored outside, and he “took a chance and swam out to it.”
Armstrong, still in “shock” over his loss, is now refusing to leave the island until his wife’s body is retrieved.
“Everything I own is gone,” Armstrong said. “Every single thing.”
Unfortunately, Lynn’s death is just one of many as a result of Dorian, which made landfall on Abaco Island as a strong Category 5 storm. Bringing with it sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts of 220 mph, more than 13,000 homes have been destroyed and much of the islands are covered in floodwater.
“We are in the midst of a historic tragedy,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis of the Bahamas said at an evening press conference, The New York Times reports. “Our focus is search, rescue and recovery. I ask for your prayers for those in affected areas and for our first responders.”
Although many of the victims of the storm have not yet been named, 7-year-old Lachino McIntosh was among the first to be confirmed dead. The young boy drowned while attempting to flee his destroyed home with his family on Sunday.
“I don’t know what to feel, my grandson’s dead. I just saw my grandson about two days ago and he told me he loved me,” Lachino’s grandmother, Ingrid McIntosh, told Eyewitness News. “He turned round and said ‘Grandma I love you’ and you know what I told my grandson? I said ‘that feels so good because I haven’t heard that in a long time from no one.’”
Former police officer Earnest Rahming was also killed in a car crash in Abaco hours after Dorian made landfall Sunday morning.
It is feared that as the flood waters recede, bodies will be carried out to sea.
