Storm hits amid Haiti quake rescue
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Rescue workers and doctors with little equipment worked feverishly to save victims of the earthquake in southwestern Haiti on Monday as a powerful storm threatened to unleash flooding and further snarl aid efforts.
Rain began falling Monday afternoon, driving thousands of exhausted, newly homeless people to seek shelter. Officials estimated that Tropical Depression Grace would dump 5 to 10 inches of rain on the region. The U.S. National Hurricane Center warned that Grace, while downgraded from a tropical storm, could still cause flash flooding and mudslides in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“We’re pleading for help,” Marie-Helen L’Esperance, mayor of the harbor town of Pestel, told Haiti’s Pacific Radio. “Every house was destroyed; there’s nowhere to live. We need shelters, medical help and especially water. We’ve had nothing for three days, and injured victims are starting to die.”
She said the prospect of heavy rain had “spread fear through residents who had
nothing left but to pray.”
The 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Saturday morning killed at least 1,419 people, nearly razing some towns and triggering landslides that hampered rescue efforts in the country. The Caribbean nation’s Civil Protection agency Monday also raised the number of injured to 6,000.
“We are working now to ensure that the resources we have are going to get to the places that are hardest hit,” said agency head Jerry Chandler, referring to the provinces of Cayes, Jeremie and Nippe, which are in the country’s southwestern portion.
The disaster was the latest for the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation — coming on top of a raging covid-19 pandemic, rising gang violence, an economic crisis and acute political instability after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise last month. Haiti was devastated 11 years ago by another earthquake that reduced the capital to ruins.
UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said humanitarian needs were acute, with many Haitians urgently needing health care, clean water and shelter. Children separated from their parents also needed protection, she said.
On Monday, aid began to trickle in to the worst-hit areas. A 65-member search-and-rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., dispatched by USAID, arrived in Haiti and headed for Les Cayes, a city of around 100,000 people. UNICEF said it had sent medical kits for 30,000 people to the city, roughly 90 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The U.S. Coast Guard was ferrying injured victims to the capital.
Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Colombia also sent assistance. Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry pledged to speed up the relief effort. “From this Monday, we will move faster. Aid provision is going to be accelerated,” he wrote on Twitter.
Elizabeth Riley, executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, said the Haitian government was prioritizing cash donations because supplies could be purchased in the capital and other areas not pummeled by the quake.
As work, fuel and money are running out, desperate Les Cayes residents are searching collapsed houses for scrap metal to sell. Others are waiting for money wired from abroad, a mainstay of Haiti’s economy even before the quake.
Anthony Emile waited six hours in a line with dozens of others trying to get money his brother had wired from Chile, where he has worked since Haiti’s last quake.
“We have been waiting since morning for it, but there are too many people,” said Emile, a banana farmer who said relatives in the countryside depend on him giving them money to survive.
Aid workers also expressed concern about violent gangs that have largely cut off the main road from the capital to the southwest in recent months. U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs called Haiti’s southern peninsula a “hot spot for gang-related violence,” where humanitarian workers have been repeatedly attacked. The agency also said the area has been “virtually unreachable” over the past two months because of road blocks and security concerns.
The armed groups have agreed to a one-week ceasefire to allow humanitarian assistance through, U.N. officials said. Muhamed Bizimana, the assistant country director for the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, said that a U.N. aid convoy had traveled the road without incident Sunday.
“We do hope that roads will be increasingly be accessible and nonrisky,” he said in a phone interview from Portau-Prince, adding that the aid group’s pre-positioned supplies were running low in some areas.
Violent gangs weren’t the only problem. Chandler said Colombian search and rescue teams that planned to travel from Port-au-Prince to the shattered area — including the port town of Jeremie — were unable to get through.
“The difficulty is that the bridge over the Glace River collapsed,” blocking travel over National Route 7, a crucial artery, he said. “It will take a massive effort to repair it.”
30,000 FAMILIES HOMELESS
Officials said more than 7,000 homes were destroyed and nearly 5,000 damaged from the quake, leaving some 30,000 families homeless. Hospitals, schools, offices and churches also were destroyed or badly damaged.
Injured earthquake victims continued to stream into Les Cayes’ overwhelmed general hospital, three days after the earthquake struck. Patients waited to be treated on stair steps, in corridors and the hospital’s open veranda.
“After two days, they are almost always generally infected,” said Dr. Paurus Michelete, who had treated 250 patients and was one of only three doctors on call when the quake hit.
Efforts to treat the injured were difficult at the hospital, where Michelete said pain killers, analgesics and steel pins to mend fractures were running out amid the crush of patients.
“We are saturated, and people keep coming,” he said.
Josil Eliophane, 84, crouched on the steps of the hospital, clutching an X-ray showing his shattered arm bone and pleading for pain medication.
Michelete said he would give one of his few remaining shots to Eliophane, who ran out of his house as the quake hit, only to be struck by a falling wall.
Nearby, on the hospital’s open-air veranda, patients were on beds and mattresses, hooked up to IV bags of saline fluid. Others lay in the garden under bed sheets erected to shield them from the brutal sun. None of the patients or relatives caring for them wore face masks amid a coronavirus surge.
David Geleste, a doctor in the seaside city of Baladeres, called the situation there “catastrophic.”
“Medical help is urgently needed,” he told Radio Caribe. “It’s critical in the first two to four days. We have many injured with fractured limbs and need to mobilize basic materials like painkillers, bandages, braces. We have to perform urgent operations but don’t have the equipment.”
In Jeremie, doctors were treating patients underneath trees and on mattresses alongside roads since hospitals were overwhelmed, Reuters reported.
Haiti already had a fragile health system. Then came the covid-19 epidemic. Until last month — when the U.S. government donated 500,000 doses of Moderna — Haiti was the only country in the Americas that hadn’t received a single vaccine. The earthquake pushed already stretched hospitals to the brink of collapse.
“Basically all the health facilities are overwhelmed, all the referral hospitals are full,” Bizimana said. “And there are still people coming in.”