Hurricane Matthew, the fiercest Caribbean storm in nearly a decade, blasted the Bahamas on Thursday (October 6) as it headed for the southeastern United States after killing at least 140 people, mostly in Haiti, on its deadly northward march.

Matthew, carrying winds of 140 mph (220 kph), was "relentlessly pounding" the northwestern part of the island chain en route to Florida's Atlantic coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

As the storm passed about 25 miles (40 km) from the Bahamas capital of Nassau, howling gusts of wind brought down palms and other trees and flipped shingles off the rooftops of many houses.

"I mean it's a pretty bad storm. With social media I saw a lot of pictures; I saw the devastation, what it did in some of the other countries. So, being from the Bahamas, I was terrified. It was a really bad storm and the thing about it is, they had a lot of rainfall behind it which caused a lot of damage," a local resident, Roshan Noronha told Reuters in Nassau.

Bahamas Power and Light disconnected much of Nassau as Matthew bore down on the town.

"If it's as bad as it was here, I'm really worried about the people in the low-lying areas. Hopefully a lot of them got further away from the storm. We were kinda stuck. We couldn't get anywhere. But they had the ability to get in their cars and drive. So, hopefully they've done that," a tourist who identified himself only as Cliff, said.

Local media reports from southern New Providence indicated that the communities of Yamacraw, Coral Harbour and Pinewood were hit hard by floods after a storm surge of some 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters). There had been no reports of casualties.

The hurricane was likely to remain a Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale as it approached the United States, where it could either take direct aim at Florida or brush along the state's coast through Friday (October 7) night, the centre said, warning of "potentially disastrous impacts."