A man living in the Bahamas described watching his wife drown when a storm surge from Hurricane Dorian flooded his house.

"It came over the roof. I would imagine 21 feet at least. We were doing all right until the water kept coming up and all the appliances were going around the house like a washing machine," Howard Armstrong, who was rescued on Tuesday, said in an emotional interview with CNN in Grand Bahama.

"That's probably — I got hit with something in there," he added, gesturing to his face.

“My poor little wife got hypothermia and she was standing on top of the kitchen cabinets until they disintegrated. And then I kept with her and she just drowned on me,” he said.

Howard Armstrong survived Hurricane Dorian, but lost everything, including his wife, reports @CNN_Oppmann. “My poor little wife got hypothermia… I kept with her and she just drowned on me,” Armstrong says. https://t.co/1pzCxlwwQQ pic.twitter.com/7xMtoJroPB — The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) September 3, 2019

Explaining he is a crab fisherman, Armstrong told CNN's Patrick Oppmann he had no tools to cut through the ceiling; when it got to a point where the water level was too high, he "took a chance" and swam out to where he noticed his boat was still secured to a mooring in the storm.

Oppmann said Armstrong told him that after escaping, he went to the house of his neighbor, who had been calling for help, only to see her dead body through the window.

Oppmann added that Armstrong was in "incredible shock" and that the hurricane survivor asked rescuers if they could retrieve his wife's dead body, but was told that rescuing the living is their first priority.

Dorian slammed into the northern Bahamas as a high-end Category 5 hurricane over Labor Day weekend. As many as 13,000 homes there have been damaged or destroyed, and at least seven people have been reported killed by Dorian. But that figure is expected to rise as rescue crews search the island chain.

Dorian, now weakened to a Category 2 hurricane, is moving close to the coast of Florida before it is expected to swipe the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Evacuation orders in coastal areas extend from Florida to the Carolinas.