The death toll from Hurricane Melissa rose Thursday to nearly 50 people, officials said, after the ferocious storm devastated Caribbean islands and was bearing down on Bermuda. Flooding was expected to subside in the Bahamas although high water could persist in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) 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. 

Tropical storm conditions were occurring on Bermuda late Thursday and the island was under a hurricane warning, with maximum sustained winds of 100 miles (155 kilometers) per hour, the NHC said. The government urged residents to take precautionary measures against the still-powerful storm. Melissa smashed into both Jamaica and Cuba with enormous force, and residents were assessing their losses and the long road to recovery.

"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. 

"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.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)