Deadly hurricane slams into Haiti, heads toward U.S. coast.
PETIT-GOAVE, Haiti — Hurricane Matthew slammed into Haiti’s southwestern tip with howling 145 mph winds Tuesday, knocking down trees and tearing off roofs in the poor and largely rural area, while inundating neighborhoods in floodwaters and mud.
By nightfall, at least 11 deaths had been blamed on the powerful storm during its week-long march across the Caribbean. But with a key bridge washed out, impassable roads and phone communication cut off with Haiti’s hardest-hit area, there was no way to know how many people might be dead or injured.
The storm whipped at Cuba’s sparsely populated eastern tip Tuesday night, as it headed for a two-day run up the length of the Bahamas that would take it near the U.S. coast.
Hours after Matthew made landfall on Haiti’s now-marooned southwestern peninsula, government leaders said they couldn’t fully gauge the impact.
“What we know is that many, many houses have been damaged. Some lost rooftops and they’ll have to be replaced while others were totally destroyed,” Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph said.
At least five deaths were blamed on the storm in Haiti, including a 26-yearold man who drowned trying to rescue a child who fell into a rushing river, authorities said. The child was saved.
The mayor in flooded Petit Goave reported two people died there, including a woman who was killed by a falling electrical pole.
Four deaths were recorded in the neighboring Dominican Republic and one each in Colombia and in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Forecasters said Matthew could hit Florida by Thursday night and push its way up the East Coast over the weekend. The forecast triggered a rush by Americans to stock up on food, gasoline and other emergency supplies.
The dangerous Category 4 storm — at one point the most powerful hurricane in the region in nearly a decade — blew ashore around dawn in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, hitting a corner of Haiti where many people live in shacks of wood or concrete blocks.
In the U.S., Florida Gov. Rick Scott urged coastal residents to prepare for the possibility of a direct hit and line up three days’ worth of food, water and medicine. The Red Cross put out a call for volunteers in South Carolina. And the White House said relief supplies were being moved to emergency staging areas in the Southeast.
People raced to supermarkets, gas stations and hardware stores, buying up groceries, water, plywood, tarps, batteries and propane. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said she would issue an evacuation order Wednesday so 1 million people would have time to leave the coast.