NASSAU, Sept 7 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The death toll from Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas has risen to 43, media outlets said late Friday, and was expected to grow “significantly.”
Bahamas newspaper The Tribune cited Health Minister Duane Sands as confirming the new toll, up from 30.
“Forty-three is the official count, many missing and this number is
expected to grow significantly,” Erica Wells Cox, a spokeswoman for Prime
Minister Hubert Minnis, said.
Some 70,000 people are in need of aid on Abaco and Grand Bahama islands, and thousands are desperately trying to find loved ones, with many gathering on social media and one main website in hopes of finding any news.
More than 6,660 people were listed on the website Dorian People Search Bahamas as of Friday morning, as thousands were seeking information about their missing loved ones following the hurricane, site founder Vanessa Pritchard-Ansell, said.
She said there were still many people desperate to hear from their loved ones with communication down and thousands of people displaced from their homes.
“It started because I realized very quickly that there needed to be a central location for people to ask has anyone seen or has anyone heard from my loved one,” she said.
The website, launched earlier this week, grew out of the Facebook group Pritchard-Ansell created Sunday night as the storm hit the islands.
Pritchard-Ansell, a real estate agent and native of Nassau, said she initially created the Facebook group because she has colleagues who were displaced by the storm. As a mother to a 10-month old baby, she was also moved by harrowing accounts of parents having to escape from the hurricane with their children and of families separated during the storm.
“None of us can know what these people are going through,” she said.
The group now has about 11,000 members on the Facebook page.
As a next phase in the search for the missing, a woman from Marsh Harbour in the Abaco Islands created a Google document which grew to almost 50 pages long, she said.
The site asks people to list the full name, sex, date of birth, age, place of birth and last known location of missing individuals and it can be updated when a listed person went goes from missing to “status known.”
She said the experience has left her hoping government agencies around the world would create a database where people can go to mark if a love done was missing, if their status was known or if they needed a critical evacuation following natural disasters.
“There’s such a need for this,” she said. — NNN-AGENCIES
