Rising sea levels caused extensive flooding as the storm – predicted to be the most dangerous in the region in more than a decade – approached the island’s southern coast.The US National Hurricane Centre’s Richard Pasch said: “We are looking at a dangerous hurricane that is heading into the vicinity of western Haiti and eastern Cuba.“People who are impacted by things like flooding and mudslides hopefully would get out and relocate because that’s where we have seen loss of life in the past.”Haiti’s government has closed schools and two airports until Wednesday and more than 500 people have been evacuated from the city of Jeremie ahead of the tropical typhoon.The hemisphere’s poorest country was already badly affected by a hurricane which hit earlier in the season.Officials have been urging shantytown residents to move to shelters; some have gone but many others have refused, fearing their already limited possessions may be stolen. One unemployed man who lives in a shack in Tabarre, a suburb of capital Port-au-Prince, said: “If we lose our things we are not going to get them back!”Another, who lives with her husband and three children in one of the hillside shacks in danger of collapse, said: “I know my house could easily blow away. All I can do is pray and then pray some more.”Forecasters predict the storm could drop as much as 40 inches of rain on some isolated areas of Haiti, raising fears of deadly mudslides and floods in the heavily deforested country where flooding is common.The hurricane has already caused the death of one Haitian, a fisherman in St Jean Du Sud in the south. Another man died in Colombia and a teenager was killed in St Vincent and the Grenadines as the storm moved through the Caribbean.Matthew is also expected to hit Cuba about 50 miles east of the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where authorities have already evacuated hundreds of wives and children from the base.The hurricane centre expects the storm to then move northwards through the Bahamas but it is still too soon to predict if it will become a threat to the US’s east coast area.