Hundreds of Bahamians were up-in-arms Tuesday after reading an online article written by an American journalist, who painted a poverty-stricken picture of the living conditions in The Bahamas.

When international freelance journalist Nellie Day produced the article online at www.travels.com, it’s safe to say that she never imagined that it would create such a national uproar.

The article, entitled “What types of houses do people live in, in The Bahamas,” went viral on Facebook shortly before noon Tuesday.

Hundreds of outraged Bahamians took to Twitter and Facebook to sound off on the article, taking grave exception to its content.

The online article suggests that many Bahamians make their living as farmers or by selling trinkets at the local straw market – and according to Ms. Day, these “farmers and trinket sellers,” are considered “lower and lower-middle classed Bahamians who live in small beach shacks and huts.”

She also suggested that “the poorest Bahamians” typically create makeshift homes out of straw and wood.

According to Ms. Day, these structures are poorly executed and are usually built by the “shack occupants with no professional help.”

“For people to think that we live on the beach and that we work in the straw market and sell trinkets every day and that’s how we all live, I just don’t understand how she can say that this is all accurate. I just cannot begin to understand how she even calls herself a journalist when she says she came here but reported something that was so false,” Olivia Dorsett said.

According to information from www.travels.com Ms. Day has a Master’s degree in Broadcast Journalism and a Bachelors degree in Sociology and English.

“I think that someone from that website should have regularised that information before she was allowed to post that on the website where the world can view it. I don’t think that anyone should be allowed to post information like this online about an entire country, basically lambasting us with no kind of authority to oversee it,” Kendenique Moss said.

After Ms. Day classified the style of homes she claimed lower class Bahamians reside in, she then moved on to “middle class” Bahamians whom she said were very few in numbers.

She said middle class Bahamians build their homes from brick and concrete and the buildings consist of one large room that is divided by makeshift dividers made from sheets, straw, wooden boards or beaded curtains.

The article went on to suggest that beachfront land is typically too valuable to allow these “one room structures,” to be erected.

Ms. Day said the beachfront is set aside for the upper middle class, which generally consists of only “government officials, real estate agents, resort owners, tourism officials and businesspeople from Europe, Canada and the United States.

While the inaccurate descriptions of local living conditions disappointed many Bahamians, a majority of individuals who spoke to the Bahama Journal noted that they were even more discouraged by the fact that Ms. Day is a well-educated woman.

As word spread about the article and as more Bahamians, by the hundreds, began to voice their outrage via various social networking sites, there were a number of angry Bahamians who actually penned letters of displeasure to the webpage manager who was responsible for publishing the article.

The Bahama Journal’s Ianthia Smith was among that number of concerned Bahamians who wrote the web-based company.

Within two hours the webpage’s manager, identified only as “Brett,” responded.

“We have reviewed the article and determined that it does not meet the standards for our site, because of the number of factual inaccuracies in it. Therefore, the article has been deleted from our site. It will take time for the change to show up on all of our servers, but the article will definitely be completely removed within the next 12 hours,” Brett said.

In less than 24 hours, Nellie Day, an international journalist, who was basically unknown to most Bahamians, became somewhat of a household name locally for all the wrong reasons