(TIML NEWS) Now a Category 2 storm, Dorian’s winds and rains have begun to lash the Florida shore as the storm continues to pound the Bahamas, where rescue missions were hampered by rising seawater.

Rescue efforts in the Bahamas are being hampered by flooding.

Hurricane Dorian, now a Category 2 storm, is finally inching away from the Bahamas, where rescue missions were hampered on Tuesday because so many police and government vehicles are submerged in rising seawater.

The storm, which hit the northern Bahamas as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, has pummeled the islands for more than two days with unrelenting rain and wind, and has killed at least five people there. It is highly unusual for a storm of Dorian’s magnitude to halt and hover over land, as it did in the Bahamas.

By Tuesday afternoon its center was north of Grand Bahama Island and creeping northwest at 5 miles an hour. With maximum sustained winds at 110 m.p.h., Dorian was expected to start turning north and to travel parallel to Florida’s eastern coast by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

The storm is not expected to leave the Grand Bahama area until 10 p.m. or midnight, said Kevin D. Harris, director general of the Bahamas Information Center.

Emergency offices have received at least 200 frantic calls from people stranded on their rooftops or attics. Responders were trying to help after the eye passed over the island, but “some of the bigger vehicles, dump trucks and fire engines are trying to get through the water,” Mr. Harris said.

There was so much water that government offices, including the government radio station, had to move out of the lower floors of buildings. A government minister who was stuck in his flooded home was rescued, Mr. Harris said.