Transcript for Category 4 Maria makes landfall in Puerto Rico

Hurricane MARIA slamming Puerto Rico, the island now taking a direct hit. Infrastructure already weakened from Irma. We have not experienced an event of this magnitude in our modern history. Reporter: People scrambling to board up their hopes and make it to one of the 500 shelters open. The airport shutting down overnight. We're going to Santo doumingo to get out of the storm. Reporter: This group vacationing on a honeymoon taking cover in their hotel room as MARIA barrels over the island. We prepared. We have supplies. We thought about worst case scenario situations. Reporter: Ripping through the caribbean. Can't really see it but you can hear it. Reporter: Wreaking havoc on the Virgin Islands. Winds have picked up a lot. Reporter: At its height a category 5 storm with winds of 175 miles per hour. I'm scared. I'm really scared. Reporter: St. Croix taking a pounding and people trying to ride out the storm there. John Rhodes was there with three friends as MARIA moved in. We're in a solid three-story concrete structure. We moved into our second room. Our first room started to have a lot of water come in. It's very scary and the wind I think is over 105 miles an hour right now. Reporter: The storm claiming one life in Guadeloupe with more missing, 80,000 without power. Neighborhood streets now rivers. Dominica taking a direct hit. Communications nearly all cut off. Family members of a med student at Ross university trying desperately to reach out to the island still with no power. You want to know your loved ones are safe. Marco has been there since may. He is an awesome kid, and I just need to hear from him. Reporter: First year med student mark Joe's parents said they haven't heard from him since Monday night. Tell me when to go. We are back on the northern side of San Juan here. I can only imagine what went down when this thing made landfall on the southeast corner of this island. Obviously the eye getting closer and closer to us. That eye wall now scraping the northern beaches. These palm trees are just being tested to their limit. You can see barely see the surf behind me Lew all this rain that's blowing sideways. It is just pounding this shoreline and coming up on some of the buildings here, the storm surge is actually really encroaching on this building here which is standing up fairly well. It's pretty impressive how this particular structure is built. Still communications, our signal has been going up and down and the very rossty of this wind right here. Not a whole lot of damage reports coming in yet, obviously, because of the communication but I assure you even as a category 4 they will be substantial. This is the strongest storm that this island has seen in over 80 years and the governor telling us this morning that 10,000 people roughly checked into shelters last night, which honestly seems like a low number considering how many people are evacuated out of the southeast corner of this island so hopefully people got to safe and strurd DI structures like we are right now but there's debris flying around the city of San Juan and really we're just now getting into the tough stuff. We can see that, rob. We want you to get inside right now. You are way close to that balcony. Thanks for that report.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.