Hurricane Melissa leaves trail of destruction across Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica

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SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba (AP) — Hurricane Melissa left at least dozens dead amid widespread destruction across Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica, where roofless homes, toppled utility poles and water-logged furniture dominated the landscape Wednesday.

A landslide blocked the main roads of Santa Cruz in Jamaica's St. Elizabeth parish, where the streets were reduced to mud pits. 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 Wednesday 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.

Melissa made landfall Tuesday in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane with top winds of 185 mph (295 kph), 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.

At least 25 people have died across Haiti and 18 are missing, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said in a statement Wednesday. Twenty of those reported dead and 10 of the missing are from a southern coastal town where flooding collapsed dozens of homes. At least eight are dead in Jamaica.

In Cuba, officials reported collapsed houses, blocked mountain roads and roofs blown off buildings Wednesday, with the heaviest destruction concentrated in the southwest and northwest. 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 Wednesday, covered by a plastic sheet in the intermittent rain.

Forecasters expect Melissa, now a Category 1 hurricane, to bring dangerous winds, flooding and storm surge to the Bahamas on Wednesday night.

In Jamaica, more than 25,000 people were packed into shelters Wednesday after the storm ripped roofs off their homes and left them temporarily homeless. Dixon said 77% of the island was without power.

The outages complicated assessing the damage because of “a total communication blackout” in areas, Richard Thompson, acting director general of Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, told the Nationwide News Network radio station.

“Recovery will take time, but the government is fully mobilized,” Prime Minister Andrew Holness said in a statement. “Relief supplies are being prepared, and we are doing everything possible to restore normalcy quickly.”

Officials in Black River, Jamaica, a southwestern coastal town of approximately 5,000 people, pleaded for aid at a news conference Wednesday.

“Catastrophic is a mild term based on what we are observing,” Mayor Richard Solomon said.

Solomon said the local rescue infrastructure had been demolished by the storm. The hospital, police units and emergency services were inundated by floods and unable to conduct emergency operations.

Jamaican Transportation Minister Daryl Vaz said two of the island’s airports will reopen Wednesday to relief flights only, with U.N. agencies and dozens of nonprofits on standby to distribute basic goods.

“The devastation is enormous,” he said. “We need all hands on deck to recover stronger and to help those in need at this time.”

The United States is sending rescue and response teams to assist in recovery efforts in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X.

St. Elizabeth Police Superintendent Coleridge Minto told Nationwide News Network on Wednesday that authorities have found at least four bodies in southwest Jamaica. One death was reported in the west when a tree fell on a baby, state minister Abka Fitz-Henley told Nationwide News Network.

Before landfall, Melissa had already been blamed for three deaths in Jamaica, three in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic.

Hurricane Melissa damaged more than 160 homes and destroyed 80 others in the town of Petit-Goâve, where 10 of the 20 people killed there were children, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said Wednesday.

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 screamed as they searched for their missing children, he said.

“People have lost everything,” Saint-Vil said.

Although the immediate threat of the storm has passed, Saint-Vil said Petit-Goâve'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, neighbors are helping one another source necessities and find places to sleep. 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.

People in the eastern Cuban province of Santiago de Cuba began clearing debris around the collapsed walls of their homes Wednesday after Melissa made landfall in the region hours earlier.

“Life is what matters,” Alexis Ramos, a 54-year-old fisherman, said as he surveyed his destroyed home and shielded himself from the intermittent rain with a yellow raincoat. “Repairing this costs money, a lot of money.”

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 Díaz-Canel wrote on X.

The hurricane could worsen Cuba’s severe economic crisis, which already has led to prolonged power blackouts along with fuel and food shortages.

Cuba’s National Institute of Hydraulic Resources reported accumulated rainfall of 15 inches (38 centimeters) in Charco Redondo and 14 inches (36 centimeters) in Las Villas Reservoir.

Wednesday evening, Melissa had top sustained winds of 90 mph (150 kph) and was moving northeast at 16 mph (26 kph) according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. The hurricane was centered about 80 miles (135 kilometers) southeast of the central Bahamas.

Authorities in the Bahamas were evacuating dozens of people from the archipelago’s southeast corner ahead of Melissa’s arrival.

Melissa’s center is forecast to move through southeastern Bahamas later Wednesday, generating up to 7 feet (2 meters) of storm surge in the area. By late Thursday, Melissa is expected to pass just west of Bermuda.

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Rodríguez reported from Havana, Myers from Santa Cruz, Jamaica, and Sanon from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Dánica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed to this report.