The death toll in the Bahamas in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian rose to 30, according to multiple reports.
Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis told CNN about the increased fatalities Thursday evening. Previous reports indicated that 23 people had died due to the storm.
The Bahamas’s minister of health, Duane Sands, told The New York Times that the death count after the storm hit “could be staggering.”
“We are embalming bodies so that we have more capacity as new bodies are brought in,” Sands said.
“We need to get coolers into Abaco and Grand Bahama, because we believe that we may not have the capacity to store the bodies,” he added, referring to areas that were hit hardest by Dorian.
The storm has been weakened since it hit the Bahamas and was headed toward North and South Carolina on Thursday. The National Hurricane Center tweeted Thursday night that the wall of Dorian’s eye was “very near” Cape Fear, N.C.
