Hurricane Melissa blasted Cuba and Haiti with torrential rain and howling winds on Wednesday, inflicting even more damage just hours after it devastated parts of Jamaica, ripping the roofs off homes and hospitals, flooding villages and littering roadways with trees and electrical poles.
In both Haiti and Jamaica, the authorities began to tally the dead. Around 20 people, including children, died in a Haitian community where swollen rivers spilled into homes, and five bodies were found in St. Elizabeth, a hard-hit parish in southwestern Jamaica, where Melissa struck the island as a Category 5 hurricane.
In that parish, the storm left a “complete disaster,” said Floyd Green, the agricultural minister. “Entire buildings have collapsed,” he said, adding that he had heard reports of villages where “every single house is without a roof.”
Among the dead in St. Elizabeth Parish were three men and a woman, Desmond McKenzie, a Jamaican minister who has been coordinating the emergency response, said in a statement. The parish’s church, tax office, council office, supermarket and bakery were also badly damaged, Superintendent Coleridge Minto, the head of the St. Elizabeth Parish police, told reporters.
“Everything has been washed away by floodwaters, and so the situation is, in fact, very bad,” he said, adding that there was “an urgent need for support.”
Communication problems and power outages were hampering the authorities’ ability to assess the full scope of the devastation. Nearly 80 percent of the country was without electricity on Wednesday morning, said Dana Morris Dixon, Jamaica’s information minister.
“I know so many people have said they cannot reach their families in western Jamaica. That’s because of damage to the telecoms infrastructure,” she said at a news conference.
About 25,000 Jamaicans were staying in shelters, and officials warned that many might not be able to return to homes that had been destroyed or damaged. Some may also not have enough food because farms in St. Elizabeth, known as Jamaica’s breadbasket, were devastated, Dennis Zulu, a United Nations relief coordinator in Jamaica, said at a news conference.
Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s prime minister, said in a statement to Jamaicans, especially those in the hard-hit west, that the government was racing to help them.
“We know many of you are hurting, uncertain, and anxious after Hurricane Melissa, but please know that you are not alone,” he said. “Our teams are on the ground working tirelessly to rescue, restore, and bring relief where it’s needed most.”
The eastern parts of Jamaica, including the capital, Kingston, were mostly unscathed, officials said. All the roughly 25,000 tourists who were in Jamaica were accounted for and in good health, Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s tourism minister, said in an interview on Wednesday. And Mr. McKenzie, the Jamaican minister coordinating the emergency response, said three babies were born during the storm.
“Despite our challenges, we rise to the occasion,” he said in a news conference.
Melissa, which tore across Jamaica with 185 mile per hour winds, had weakened to a Category 2 hurricane, with 120 mile per hour winds, when it made landfall in Cuba early Wednesday. But it was still packing a powerful punch as it roared north over the island and headed toward the eastern Bahamas.
Roofs flew off buildings and houses collapsed in urban and rural areas, said the governor of Cuba’s Granma Province, Yanetsy Terry Gutiérrez. She described an “interminable” night and morning and shared photos on social media of an uprooted tree, a swollen river and buildings partially submerged in muddy floodwaters.
Parts of eastern Cuba had received more than 14 inches of rain and some small cities and tows were swamped, officials said. The Cuban municipality of Sagua de Tánamo, home to about 45,000 people, was partly flooded after the Sagua de Tánamo River overflowed, and videos on social media showed water rising over doorsteps and creeping up to rooftops there.
Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said more than 735,000 people had been evacuated ahead of the storm, which knocked out power in the country’s eastern provinces.
Although Haiti and the Dominican Republic were not directly in the path of the huge storm, it was also bringing the risk of “catastrophic flash flooding and landslides” to those countries, the National Hurricane Center said. The hurricane was expected to cause a dangerous storm surge in Turks and Caicos on Wednesday as well, the center said.
About 20 people, including children, died in the Haitian community of Petit-Goâve as a result of the storm, according to Ronald Louis, a technical manager for the Municipal Civil Protection Committee. Sudden floods pushed the Digue River over its banks around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, flooding more than 160 homes, he said. Another dozen people remain missing.
“The requests for aid are immense,” Mr. Louis said. “Hygiene kits, drinking water, shelters, sanitation kits, clothing and heavy equipment to work on the river, because if nothing is done, the waters could cause the same damage again if it rains. Rain is falling intermittently, and we are proceeding with the evacuation of residents.”
The U.S. State Department said it would deploy disaster-response teams to Caribbean countries impacted by Melissa. The department also said in a social media post that it had “activated” Urban Search and Rescue teams. In the past, the U.S. Agency for International Development had taken the lead on disaster response efforts after hurricanes in the Caribbean, but the Trump administration shuttered the agency earlier this year.
Reporting was contributed by Anushka Patil, Alan Yuhas, Claire Fahy, Ed Augustin and Annie Correal.
Nazaneen Ghaffar is a Times reporter on the Weather team.
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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