This church in Haiti was ripped apart by Hurricane Matthew. Rescue workers on the island nation are trying to reach cutoff towns. The storm began battering the Bahamas Wednesday.

LES CAYES, Haiti — Two days after Hurricane Matthew rampaged across Haiti’s remote southwestern peninsula, authorities and aid workers still lack a clear picture of what they fear is the country’s biggest disaster in years.

But as the weather began calming, convoys and helicopters have begun venturing to marooned corners of the country to assess the damage and determine how to help thousands of people who lost homes, livestock and crops.

At least 16 deaths in the Caribbean have been blamed on the storm. The death toll in Haiti alone was raised to 10 by the country’s civil protection agency Wednesday, but the number was expected to rise.

In southern peninsula towns where Matthew arrived around daybreak Tuesday with 145 mph winds, there was wreckage and misery everywhere.

“The floodwater took all the food we have in the house. Now we are starving and don’t have anything to cook,” said farmer Antoine Louis as he stood in brown water up to his thighs in the doorway of his deluged concrete shack.

In Aquin, a coastal town outside the battered city of Les Cayes, people trudged through mud around the wreckage of clapboard houses and tiny shops.

Civil aviation authorities reported counting 3,214 destroyed homes along the southern peninsula, where many families live in shacks with sheet metal roofs and don’t always have the resources to escape harm’s way.

The government has estimated at least 350,000 people need some kind of assistance after the disaster. International aid groups are already appealing for donations for Haiti, the hemisphere’s least developed nation.