Hurricane Melissa has seen its death toll enter double digits amid widespread destruction across Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica, where roofless homes and water-logged furniture dominated the landscape.
At least 25 people were killed across Haiti and 18 are missing, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said in a statement on Wednesday.
Twenty of those reported dead and 10 of the missing are from the southern coastal town of Petit-Goave, where flooding collapsed dozens of homes.
Hurricane Melissa damaged more than 160 homes and destroyed 80 others, with 10 of the 20 people killed there confirmed to be children.
Lawyer Charly Saint-Vil, 30, said he saw bodies lying among the debris after the storm as he walked the streets of the small coastal town where he grew up.
“People have lost everything,” he said, adding they screamed as they searched for their children.
Although the immediate threat of the storm has passed, Mr Saint-Vil said Petit-Goave’s residents were living in fear about access to medicine, water and food in the coming days, given the political instability in Haiti.
“We don’t know what will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” he said.
For now, neighbours are helping one another source necessities and find places to sleep.
Mr Saint-Vil is hosting a number of friends who lost their homes in his small apartment. “What I can do, I will do it, but it’s not easy because the situation is really complicated for everyone,” he said.
In Cuba, officials reported collapsed houses, blocked mountain roads and roofs blown off buildings on Wednesday, with the heaviest destruction concentrated in the south-west and north-west.
Authorities said about 735,000 people remained in shelters.
“That was hell. All night long, it was terrible,” said Reinaldo Charon in Santiago de Cuba.
The 52-year-old was one of the few people venturing out on Wednesday, covered by a plastic sheet in the intermittent rain.
Local media showed images of the Juan Bruno Zayas Clinical Hospital with severe damage: glass scattered across the floor, waiting rooms in ruins and masonry walls crumpled on the ground.
“As soon as conditions allow, we will begin the recovery. We are ready,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel wrote on social media platform X.
The hurricane could worsen Cuba’s severe economic crisis, which has already led to prolonged power blackouts along with fuel and food shortages.
In Jamaica, more than 25,000 people were packed into shelters on Wednesday after the storm ripped roofs off their homes and left them temporarily homeless. At least eight people were killed.
A landslide blocked the main roads of Santa Cruz in Jamaica’s St Elizabeth parish, where the streets were reduced to mud pits, on Wednesday.
Residents swept water from homes as they tried to salvage belongings. Wind ripped off part of the roof at a high school that serves as a public shelter.
“I never see anything like this before in all my years living here,” resident Jennifer Small said.
The extent of the damage from the deadly hurricane was unclear as widespread power outages and dangerous conditions persisted in the region.
“It is too early for us to say definitively,” said Dana Morris Dixon, Jamaica’s education minister. She said 77 per cent of the island was without power.
Melissa made landfall on Tuesday in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane with top winds of 185mph (295kph), one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, before weakening and moving on to Cuba, but even countries outside the direct path of the massive storm felt its devastating effects.
Forecasters expect Melissa, now a Category 1 hurricane, to bring dangerous winds, flooding and storm surge to the Bahamas on Wednesday night.
The UK confirmed it is supporting Jamaica with £2.5m in emergency funding after Sir Keir Starmer described scenes from the country as “truly shocking”.
