The rumble of large machinery, whine of chain saws and chopping of machetes echoed through communities across the northern Caribbean on Thursday as they dug out from the destruction of Hurricane Melissa and surveyed the damage left behind.

Melissa unleashed catastrophic flooding in Haiti, where at least 30 people were reported killed and 20 others were missing, mostly in the country’s southern region.

Some 15,000 people also remained in shelters.

“It is a sad moment for the country,” said Laurent Saint-Cyr, president of Haiti’s transitional presidential council.

He said officials expect the death toll to rise and noted that the government was mobilizing resources to search for people and provide emergency relief.

Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said Hurricane Melissa killed at least 20 people, including 10 children, in Petit-Goâve, where more than 160 homes were damaged and 80 others destroyed.

In Cuba, heavy equipment began to clear blocked roads and highways and the military helped rescue people trapped in isolated communities and at risk from landslides.

No deaths were reported after the Civil Defense evacuated more than 735,000 people across eastern Cuba ahead of the storm.

The town of El Cobre in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba was one of the hardest hit.

Home to some 7,000 people, it is also the site of the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity, the patron saint of Cuba who is deeply venerated by Catholics and practitioners of Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion.

In Jamaica, government workers and residents began clearing roads in a push to reach dozens of isolated communities in the island's southeast that sustained a direct hit from one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record.

Aerial images over Black River, a coastal town of 5,000 in southwestern Jamaica, show the extent of the devastation caused the hurricane.

Few houses seem to have escaped damage at some level from the force of the winds and rain of the Category 5 Hurricane that hit the island on Tuesday.

AP Video shot by Odelyn Joseph, Ariel Fernández and Matías Delacroix