Hurricane swamps camps of Haitian quake refugees
Posted by: lisaparavisini | November 6, 2010
Storm lashes city on coast that was already in ruins, the Associate Press reports.
Hurricane Tomas flooded camps of earthquake refugees yesterday, turning some into squalid islands as it battered Haiti’s rural western tip.
The storm largely spared the vast homeless encampments in the shattered capital.
Driving 85 mph winds and a lashing storm surge battered Leogane, a seaside town west of Port-au-Prince that was 90 percent destroyed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
“We got flooded out, and we’re just waiting for the storm to pass. There’s nothing we can do,” said Johnny Joseph, a 20-year-old resident of one refugee camp.
Four deaths were confirmed by Haitian officials, all people attempting to cross rivers by car or on foot in the mountainous region near Leogane, on Haiti’s far southwestern tip. Two more people were missing in Leogane. Earlier, Tomas killed at least 14 people in the eastern Caribbean.
The storm came ashore yesterday as a Category 1 hurricane, pummeling Haiti’s southern peninsula, before moving on to the rest of the country, eastern Cuba and the Bahamas.
It could be days before the storm’s impact on Haiti is known as reports filter in from isolated mountain towns cut off by the flooding.
“We have two catastrophes that we are managing. The first is the hurricane, and the second is cholera,” President Rene Preval told the nation in a television and radio address.
Aid workers are concerned that the storm will worsen Haiti’s cholera epidemic, which has killed more than 440 people and sent more than 6,700 others to hospitals. Haitian authorities had urged the 1.3 million Haitians left homeless by the earthquake to leave the camps and go to the homes of friends and family. Buses were sent to take those who wanted to evacuate to shelters.
But many chose to stay, fearing they would come back to find that they had been evicted from the private land where they have been camped out since the quake in donated plastic tarps, or that their few possessions would be stolen before they returned.
A near-riot broke out amid a poorly coordinated relocation effort at the government’s flagship camp at Corail-Cesselesse when residents began overturning tables and throwing bottles to protest what they saw as a forced removal.
About a third of the camp’s nearly 8,000 residents ultimately went to shelters in a nearby school, church and hospital, American Refugee Committee camp manager Bryant Castro said.
In Leogane, protesters took to the streets in the pouring rain, beating drums and blasting horns as they lambasted officials for failing to build a canal along a river that has overflowed repeatedly in the past. Floodwaters filled people’s homes, swirling around the furniture and framed pictures.
“When it rains, the water rises and causes so much damage. We want them to dig a canal to move the water,” said Frantz Hilair, a 28-year-old motorcycle taxi driver. “We have a mayor and the deputy, but they don’t do anything.”
Farther north in Gonaives, a coastal city twice inundated by recent tropical storms, police evacuated more than 200 inmates from one prison to another.
U.S. Marines were standing by on the USS Iwo Jima off the coast with relief supplies.
For more go to http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2010/11/06/hurricane-swamps-camps-of-haitian-quake-refugees.html?sid=101
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Hurricane Tomas finally losing steam
Hurricane Tomas was finally fizzling out on Saturday after a week-long Caribbean rampage that killed at least 21 people and left coastal communities in Haiti underwater.
People wade through a flooded street during the passing of Hurricane Tomas in Leogane, HaitiPhoto: APA man is helped on a flooded street in Leogane Photo: GETTYA man carries a child while wading across a flooded street in Leogane Photo: APThe National Hurricane Centre in Miami said that the storm was losing steam over the open Atlantic after passing the British territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands with winds of up to 70mph, heavy rain and tornadoes.
In Haiti, parts of which endured a 24-hour beating, residents who lost homes and loved ones in January's earthquake faced disaster once again as their encampments in the seaside town of Leogane were deluged when a local river burst its banks, washing away their few possessions.
Some took to the streets in the middle of the storm to protest the government's failure to fix the infrastructure in Leogane, which was 90 per cent destroyed in the earthquake.
In the capital, Port au Prince, situated 20 miles further east, several of the tented camps and shantytowns, which house the majority of the 1.3 million earthquake refugees, were awash with mud and water, which President René Préval warned could be breeding a bigger threat.
An outbreak of cholera, transmitted through contaminated food and water, has already killed 442 people and infected nearly 7,000 in the last three weeks.
"We have two catastrophes that we are managing; the first is the hurricane and the second is cholera," said President Preval in a radio address from the presidential palace.
"Now that, relatively speaking, Haiti has escaped the danger, we have to continue to be vigilant. You can end up surviving the storms, but dying of cholera," he added.
But aid officials said that while the overall picture was still being assessed – and that some communities in the south-west had yet to be reached after floods and mudslides blocked access and bridges were rendered unusable – Haiti appeared to have avoided the wholesale disaster that many had feared.
"We prepared for the worst and we have been lucky that that scenario hasn't materialised," said Alistair Burnett, recovery operations manager for the British Red Cross, speaking from Port au Prince.
"In the perspective of what could have happened, then we have been fortunate. But with everything Haiti already has on its hands, the challenge is how we move forward over the next 12 months to get people into a better situation. And we can't be complacent with cholera at our door."
Poverty, corruption, political instability and a series of disasters have frustrated attempts to improve Haiti's prospects over many decades and less than 38 per cent of the money pledged by the international community to help post-earthquake reconstruction has yet been handed over.
Public frustration over the slow recovery is likely to be a strong influence at parliamentary and presidential elections due later this month.
In St Lucia, which suffered widespread damage and 14 deaths when Hurricane Tomas tore through earlier in the week, the prime minister appealed for $500 million (£312.5 million) in aid to get his country back on its feet.
Among the priorities was the restoration of fresh water supply, after St Lucia's main dam – which pumps eight million gallons a day – was put out of action.
It was the worst storm in St Lucia's history and wiped out its entire banana crop, which along with tourism is the island's main economic driver.
Prime Minister Stephenson King said that he had increased his earlier estimate of $100 million in damage after touring the island by helicopter.
The scale of the destruction, he said, "really and truly devastated my own psyche."
>via: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti...
