The hardest-hit communities in the Bahamas look apocalyptic after Hurricane Dorian, with wrecked homes and corpses left to rot in the hot sun

• On Sunday, New York Times reporter Kirk Semple published a report about one of the poorest areas of the Bahamas, left devastated by Hurricane Dorian.
• During a 45-minute tour of the Mudd and Pigeon Peas, shantytowns in Marsh Harbor, the capital of the Abaco Islands, locals showed Semple the bodies of six hurricane victims.
• The current death toll is listed at 45, but is expected to rise with the number missing still unknown.
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As of Monday, Hurricane Dorian had been blamed for 45 deaths in the Bahamas – but a new New York Times report shows just how conservative that number may be, with many bodies still strewn across the island chain’s poorest neighborhoods.

Times reporter Kirk Semple visit Marsh Harbour, the capital of the Abaco Islands, over the weekend. The Bahamian islands were the hardest hit by Hurricane Dorian.

Even a week after Dorian made landfall as a Category 5 storm, there were still dead bodies scattered around the Mudd and Pigeon Peas, shantytowns that are home to a community of mostly poor Haitian workers.

Pictures from the neighborhoods after the storm show that Dorian decimated the neighborhood, blowing its plywood homes apart. And with temperatures in the high 80s during the day, a stench of rotting bodies has overtaken the communities.

Locals took Semple on a tour through the neighborhoods and, in the course of 45 minutes, showed him the bodies of six hurricane victims.

Read more: 'Our government failed us': Bahamians were left to coordinate rescue efforts on social media after Hurricane Dorian

"They don't even check it," local Hubert Luberal, 47, who fled the neighborhood before the hurricane, told the Times. "They don't care."

It's unclear why the government still hasn't collected these bodies. The Royal Bahamas Police Force and the Royal Bahamas Defence Force declined or didn't answer Semple's calls and the chief governmental administrator for the region was unreachable on Sunday, the Times reported.

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• A cruise ship sailed 1,500 Hurricane Dorian evacuees from the Bahamas to Florida
• A group of jet skiers in the Bahamas rescued 100 people stranded by Hurricane Dorian
• A brief history of how Trump came up with the false claim that Hurricane Dorian could hit Alabama