atensio. reporter: to hear their stories, it s heart breaking. this is day four of this relief effort out of the airport in nasa to take t nass nassau. just to put it in perspective for our audience, nassau is a 45 minute flight from abaco and from grand bahama. and we have heard from the prime minister i just interviewed members of the cost guard, not only the hospitals but also the airports there are completely decimated. so every hour or so, one of these big aircrafts takes off from here to take water, to take medical supplies to these places and to bring back medical evacuees. i want to take time to bring in the woman who was behind this coordinated effort. this is dr. hannah, the director for the national emergency
at its full force as a category 4 hurricane yesterday. these people that have been evacuated in the past few days are staying here in nassau, and they look forward to going back to their houses and not really knowing what they re going to find there, michael. the image we have seen from the eastern islands in the caribbean st. martin s and barbuda and many of the people we are spoken with is this going to be the same for me as i go back to those islands in the south of the bahamas. michael? stefano, we ve got to talk a little bit more about barbuda in a moment and how badly hit that was. but where you are now, what about infrastructure? what about readiness? what s the sense there about being able to deal with this? what we have experienced, michael, is the bahamians are very much used to these type of events. they were definitely prepared.
that is the impression that we have got since we came here a couple of days ago. most of the people were ready who shelter in their houses, trying to make themselves as safe as possible and stocking up on food, water. especially on petrol because we know that in cases like hurricanes, petrol outage is a possibility. but we think we have experienced that the bahamians were ready for them. and we have spoken with a official from the emergency management agency just late last night. and they told us that they were still assessing the damage throughout the archipelago. but there were no casualty reports of any in the bahamas, michael. all right, stefano pozzebon, thank you so much in nassau. let s talk a little bit more. stefano mentioned about barbuda. it was badly hit. barely habitable we re told after irma really crushed the island. it was a category 5 hurricane when it hit there on wednesday.
like? reporter: so what we can see from our hotel when i went over and looked, the swells are really picking up but one of the big dangers here, stephanie, they re talking about 15 foot surges and what this means is the ocean water can get up to 15 feet and that s much higher for the people around there. the island is relatively flat and i was talking to the prime minister yesterday and he was telling me, if these surges happened, they will take out most of the houses here on the island. so we re holding out hope that doesn t happen. how much longer is it expected to be this severe, specifically, where you are in nassau? reporter: we know that, i think we re getting hit with the worst of it, but we were told it could go on for another couple of hours, so hopefully this damage won t go on for another couple hours. tammy, we ll take a break and come back to you. shortly, we re covering, of course, hurricane matthew. poised to wreak havoc on the
some of the graphics. it s up to a category four. we thought it was intensifying and now the winds start to pick up. so no longer category three. it s now category four. 140-mile-per-hour winds. northwest at 14th. that increase in full speed is anticipated. everything is on schedule. nothing has changed as far as the current initial conditions as it pulls away from nassau. the updated path and the track and start analyzing this. now we get into the crunch time here. so here we are. thursday at 8:00 p.m. this is tonight, this is just a little bit stronger at 145 miles per hour. this is coast, west palm beach and the melbourne area. they have the storm paralleling the coastline from west palm beach up to the melbourne area and right to the top of the kennedy space center. 145 to 145. 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. tomorrow. strong category four hurricane.