AFP | Santiago de Cuba
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Hurricane Melissa was "moving quickly away" from Bermuda early yesterday after the death toll rose to nearly 50 people, officials said.
The ferocious storm has devastated Caribbean islands and is expected to become an "extratropical cyclone" later in the day, reaching the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in its latest advisory.
"After Melissa becomes post-tropical, a brief period of heavy rain and gusty winds is possible over the southern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland tonight," the NHC added.
Flooding was expected to subside in the Bahamas although high water could persist in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic, the agency said.
The storm, one of the most powerful ever recorded, was made four times more likely because of human-caused climate change, according to a study by Imperial College London.
Melissa smashed into both Jamaica and Cuba with enormous force, and residents were assessing their losses and the long road to recovery.
In Jamaica, "the confirmed death toll from Hurricane Melissa is now at 19," including nine in Westmoreland and eight in St. Elizabeth, both parishes in the Caribbean island's hard-hit west, Information Minister Dana Morris Dixon told local news outlets including the Jamaica Gleaner.
Communications and transportation access remains largely down in Jamaica and Cuba, and comprehensive assessment of the damage could take days.
In impoverished Haiti, the country's civil defense agency said Thursday that the death toll had risen to 30, with 20 people injured and another 20 missing.
It said more than 1,000 homes have been flooded, with some 16,000 people in shelters.
In the east of the communist island of Cuba, battling its worst economic crisis in decades, people struggled through inundated streets lined with flooded and collapsed homes. The storm smashed windows, downed power cables and mobile communications, and tore off roofs and tree branches.
Melissa "killed us, because it left us destroyed," Felicia Correa, who lives in the La Trampa community near El Cobre, told AFP.
"We were already going through tremendous hardship. Now, of course, we are much worse off."
Cuban authorities said about 735,000 people had been evacuated -- mainly in the provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Holguin and Guantanamo.
'Disaster area'
The United States meanwhile has mobilized disaster assistance response teams and urban search and rescue personnel, and the teams were currently on the ground in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and the Bahamas, according to a State Department official.
Teams were en route to Haiti too.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also included ideological foe Havana, saying the United States is "prepared to offer immediate humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba affected by the Hurricane."
The UK government announced £2.5 million (about $3.3 million) in emergency funding for the region, and also said it was chartering "limited" flights to help British nationals leave.