More Hurricane Dorian deaths confirmed in the Bahamas

Image: Personnel from the Royal Bahamas Police Force and a U.S. urban searc
Personnel from the Royal Bahamas Police Force and a U.S. urban search and rescue team remove a body recovered in a destroyed neighborhood in the wake of Hurricane Dorian in Marsh Harbour, Great Abaco, Bahamas, September 9, 2019. Copyright Loren Elliott
By Tim Stelloh with NBC News World News
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At least 50 deaths have been confirmed, Health Minister Duane Sands said Monday.

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Hurricane Dorian's death toll in the Bahamas climbed to 50 on Monday as more deaths were reported from the storm that plowed through the country last week, officials said.

Health Minister Duane Sands confirmed the latest death count, up from 44 on Sunday, to NBC News.

Thousands of people remain missing, and relief efforts were underway on the battered Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama.

"The situation is pretty dire here," college student Kristoff Strachan on Grand Bahama told MSNBC by phone over the weekend. "It's just a lot of people trying to get out."

Rescue workers were going door to door and U.S. Coast Guard helicopters were evacuating critically injured residents.

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A Bahamas cruise ship ferried more than 1,100 Bahamians to the United States, and Customs and Border Protection delivered food and water by helicopter. The U.S. president on Monday dismissed the idea of allowing Bahamians into the U.S. after the storm, not long after the acting CBP chief said it was worth considering.

On Great Abaco, where most of the deaths occurred, the storm's devastation was evident in wrecked boats, flattened homes and downed power lines.

At an airport in Marsh Harbour, dozens of Haitian refugees were boarding a Delta flight to the Bahamas capital, Nassau, on Sunday morning. Many had fled their native island after the 2010 earthquake, settling in a hard-hit Marsh Harbour neighborhood known as "the Mudd."

"These clothes on me — that's all I have," one migrant, Joseph Farine, 69, told NBC News. "Everything's gone."

The slow-moving Category 5 storm had 185 mph maximum sustained winds, gusts that topped 200 mph and a storm surge that reached nearly two-dozen feet.

The most powerful hurricane on record to strike the Bahamas, Dorian made a direct hit on the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama.

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