Hurricane Melissa batters the Caribbean, killing some 20 in Haiti

A fisherman lugs his cooler filled with fish through floodwaters in the Treasure Beach area of Jamaica, on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (Abbie Townsend/The New York Times)

By NAZANEEN GHAFFAR, ALAN YUHAS, ANDRÉ PAULTRE and JOVAN JOHNSON

Hurricane Melissa ground forward toward the Bahamas as it carved a deadly path through the Caribbean on Wednesday. Officials in Haiti announced the deaths of about 20 people killed in overnight flooding, and three bodies were recovered in Jamaica.

In Haiti, flooding inundated more than 160 homes, according to Ronald Louis, a technical manager for the Municipal Civil Protection Committee. Children were among the dead, he said, and a dozen other people remained missing.

Melissa hit Jamaica on Tuesday as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record, at one stage packing winds of 185 mph. On Wednesday, government officials said their priority was restoring power and telecommunication services across the island in order to more fully assess the damage.

“We know that it’s western Jamaica that has the brunt of the impact,” Jamaica’s information minister, Dana Morris Dixon, said at a news conference, adding that central Jamaica, too, had “a lot of damage, a lot of flooding.”

The storm hit Cuba early Wednesday, bringing storm surge and flooding, and its outer bands drenched other parts of the region.

Melissa was downgraded to a Category 2 storm by the time it completed its pass across Cuba. But it still brought sustained winds of 100 mph and the strength to do more damage: It was expected to cause dangerous storm surges in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos as soon as Wednesday evening.

Here’s what else to know:

— Tracking the storm: Tropical storm force winds were battering the islands of the southeastern Bahamas on Wednesday, where the eye of the storm was expected to arrive in a few hours. By late Thursday, Melissa was forecast to be near Bermuda, where the country’s weather service had issued a hurricane warning.

— U.S. response: The U.S. will deploy disaster response teams to Caribbean countries impacted by Melissa, the State Department announced. The State Department also positioned supplies in six warehouses before the storm, but it was unclear where they were. In previous years, the U.S. Agency for International Development took the lead on disaster response efforts around hurricanes in the Caribbean, but the Trump administration shuttered the agency this year.

— Tourists stranded: All 25,000 international visitors who remained in Jamaica while Hurricane Melissa made landfall were accounted for and will be able to start leaving the island nation within days, said Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s tourism minister. Bartlett said he expected Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston to reopen Wednesday for relief flights and humanitarian aid. On Thursday, flights should be able to land to evacuate guests who wish to leave, he added.