Striking video of a group of people swimming through rising floodwaters in the Bahamas as Hurricane Dorian made landfall is going viral on social media.
The footage, captured by ABC News correspondent Marcus Moore, shows a group of six people managing to escape the raging flood as the then-Category 5 storm moved over the Abaco Islands on Sunday.
“Things had calmed down and we were able to go outside for the first time, and started seeing people coming out of homes that had been destroyed in the area,” Moore told Good Morning America on Monday.
Moore then said he spotted those individuals fighting the floodwaters in the near distance.
“We could hear them screaming and our producer — he was separated from them by this rushing, this torrent of water — he had to swim,” the reporter explained. “Because it was really a race against time, because we were in the eye of the storm. So it was calm, but we knew that within minutes that the rest of the storm would come through and it would be intense once again.”
The group, which consisted of a man, four women, burst into tears after pulling themselves out of the water.
“Moments after that they went to a bunker, a safe area that’s been set up here at the resort,” said Moore. “And my crew and I, we stayed in the three-story condo building where we rode out the rest of the storm.”
Hurricane Dorian, which has left at least five people dead in the Bahamas, weakened to a Category 2 storm Tuesday but continues to pose a danger as it crawls towards the southeast U.S. coast, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).
At 11:00 a.m., the center said Dorian was packing maximum sustained winds of 110 miles per hour and moving northwest towards Florida at 2 mph.
Dorian is expected to move “dangerously close” to the Florida east coast late Tuesday through Wednesday evening and then move north to coastal Georgia and South Carolina on Wednesday night and Thursday.
The AFP and Associated Press contributed to this report.