Hopes dim for hurricane victims
PORT-A-PIMENT, Haiti — Nobody has seen or heard from Edma Desravine, a 71-year-old grandfather known for his sly sense of humor and bad luck at cock fights, in the roughly 2½ weeks since Hurricane Matthew sent floodwaters and debris crashing into his riverside shantytown.
Family and neighbors near the hard-luck town of Port-a-Piment have dug by hand through wreckage and scoured the riverbanks, but to no avail.
“It pains me that I can’t say goodbye properly,” said Bernadette Desravine, holding her father’s ID card and mudsmeared baseball cap. “But I believe I will see him again in heaven.”
Hopes have dimmed for Haitians combing the countryside for missing relatives in the Caribbean nation’s hardest-hit zone, the remote and longignored southwestern tip. The central government says the official toll stands at 546 dead and 128 missing, but many believe the figures could be higher and some rugged areas still have not been fully assessed.
While relief can often be slow and chaotic in disasters all around the world, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest and least developed country is perennially beset by natural catastrophes and particularly ill-equipped to handle them. In crucial first days, assistance is often too little and too late, stalled by impassable roads, collapsed bridges and a lack of resources and infrastructure. Communications were wiped out by Matthew in large parts of the southwest, with no emergency backup.
With Haiti’s interim government taking the lead in directing relief efforts, there were no boats reaching cut-off coastal towns for days, dive crews or teams with trained search dogs looking for the missing and the dead. The U.N. stabilization mission, the U.S. government’s disaster assistance response team and numerous nongovernmental organizations all said they never received any specific request from Haiti to help locate the missing amid the ongoing effort to ferry emergency food, water and medical supplies.
Government personnel and an army of international aid workers are delivering more relief supplies to people, but local authorities in southwest Haiti say it is falling short of meeting desperate needs.
Interior Ministry spokesman Guillaume Albert Moleon insisted the government has the situation under control. He praised teams of civil protection officials and volunteers who are reaching marooned rural communities and said authorities are methodically keeping track of the dead and helping the living.
“There's so much to accomplish,” Moleon said.
Exasperated local officials said that with no heavy equipment to move debris or other resources, they were virtually powerless to help frantic relatives searching for loved ones or care for the injured.
Edma Desravine, the missing grandfather, is one of 10 people who vanished from the foothills across a rushing river from Port-a-Piment when Matthew roared through.
His family and other villagers have been walking by a woman's corpse for two weeks, averting their eyes and covering their noses and mouths with shirttails to try to filter out the stench.