Storm surge from Hurricane Matthew // Photo by Eduardo Verdugo/AP/via Newscred
Reuters is reporting that the death toll in Haiti as a result of Hurricane Matthew has soared to more than 800, officials say.
According to a Reuters tally, the number of people killed by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti rose to at least 842 on Friday, as information trickled in from remote areas that were cut off by the storm, officials said.
According to CNN, Haiti, which was devastated by an earthquake in 2010 and battered by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, is a disaster zone again. Hurricane Matthew, the most powerful Caribbean storm in a decade, has shredded homes, inundated communities and left many parts of the south-west cut off from the rest of the country, according to the CNN report.
The CNN report attributes the United Nations in estimating that the disaster has affected 350,000 people and left Haiti facing its worst humanitarian crisis since the devastating earthquake six years ago.
First Hurricane Matthew-Related Death in the U.S.
According to CNN, a 50-year-old woman suffered a cardiac arrest and died overnight in Florida, the St. Lucie Emergency Operations Center said.
Officials are calling her death storm-related because the St. Lucie Fire District had to stop responding to emergency calls due to Hurricane Matthew's fierce winds, according to CNN.
According to Weather.com, Hurricane Matthew is blasting eastern Florida's Space Coast, and is poised to deliver a punishing combination of storm surge flooding, rainfall flooding, and destructive winds in northeast Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and southern North Carolina into the weekend.
It was also reported that as of early Friday morning, roughly 600,000 houses in Florida were without power. According to CNN, most of those houses are in Martin and St. Lucie counties.
According to ABC News, the National Hurricane Center downgraded the storm to a Category 3 hurricane with 120 mph winds at 2 a.m. ET today.
The National Weather Service declared an extreme wind warning for Brevard County this morning as the western eye wall of the storm brushed by Cape Canaveral, home of the Kennedy Space Center, producing wind gusts in excess of 100 mph, according to ABC News.
According to ABC News, Matthew is projected to run parallel to the shore over the next two days, producing a potentially devastating storm surge of up to 10 feet over about 500 miles of coast that stretches from central Florida up into South Carolina.
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