ATLANTA — Millions of people along the southeastern coast of the United States on Monday braced for Hurricane Dorian as the massive storm cut a slow and devastating path across the northern Bahamas, slamming waist-high waves into kitchens and living rooms, tearing down power lines, and ripping the roofs off homes.

The National Hurricane Center said the storm, which was downgraded to a Category 4 hurricane Monday from Category 5, was still “extremely dangerous” about 25 miles northeast of Freeport.

After slamming the Bahamas on Sunday as one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record —maximum sustained winds reached 185 miles per hour with some gusts of up to 220 — it continued to wreak havoc with occasional blasting winds of 190 mph.

“On this track, the core of extremely dangerous Hurricane Dorian will continue to pound Grand Bahama Island through much of today and tonight,” the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory. “The hurricane will move dangerously close to the Florida east coast tonight through Wednesday evening.”

As Dorian approaches the Florida coast, it is expected to slowly curve toward the northwest and north, its core narrowly skirting the coastline of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas without coming ashore.

But forecasters warned that Dorian’s exact track remained uncertain: Just a slight deviation to the left of the current forecast and it could make landfall on Florida’s east coast.

A hurricane warning is in effect for Grand Bahama and Abaco islands in the northwestern Bahamas, as well as a 175-mile stretch of the central Florida coast. A hurricane watch also has been extended north that stretches up to Altamaha Sound in the middle of Georgia’s coast.

“A slight wobble West would bring this Cat 5 storm on shore with devastating consequences,” U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said Monday on Twitter, noting that the core of Dorian was expected to come within 20 to 30 miles of Cape Canaveral. “If you’re in an evacuation zone, get out NOW.”

In the Bahamas, government officials continued to hunker down Monday with residents in a government complex, which became a makeshift shelter for islanders.

“From all accounts, we have received catastrophic damage,” Bahama’s foreign minister, Darren Henfield, said from the complex in a video posted by ZNS Bahamas. “We have reports of casualties, we have reports of bodies being seen. We cannot confirm those reports until we go out and have a look for ourselves.”

Already, Dorian has left entire neighborhoods of the Bahamas under water.

“In some areas, you cannot tell the difference as to the beginning of the street or where the ocean begins,” Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said Sunday at a news conference at the headquarters of the National Emergency Management Agency.

“This is probably the most sad and worst day of my life to address the Bahamian people,” he said. “As a physician, I’ve been trained to withstand many things, but never anything like this.”

On Grand Bahama, a life-threatening storm surge, with large and destructive waves, would raise water levels by as much as 23 feet above normal tide levels, the National Hurricane Center said. Meanwhile, water levels were expected to slowly subside on the Abaco islands that bore the brunt of the storm over the weekend.

Videos shared by residents of Great Abaco,showed homes without roofs and SUVs bobbing in floodwater.

“My baby’s only 4 months old,” a woman wailed in one video. She stood at the top of a staircase Sunday looking down at her destroyed apartment complex as the wind lashed and the floodwaters rose.

Some of her neighbors, she said in the video, tried to swim across the water to another house.

“But the water just took them,” she said. “Some people, they didn’t get to make it.”

“Please pray for us,” she cried.”I’m begging y’all; pray for us.”

The Nassau Guardian later reported that the woman was Gertha Joseph, 34. In a telephone interview, she told the newspaper that her neighbor in Marsh Harbour, the Abacos’ largest town, helped put her son in a plastic carrier and escort her across the water to a safer building — the only one left standing on her street.

“Everyone is in the living room right now and the roof is about to lift,” Joseph told the newspaper. “I’m just going to keep praying.”

Across the U.S. Southeast coast, millions of residents hoped the eye of the hurricane would not veer too close to the shore and they would be spared massive damage.