Hurricane leaves at least 22 dead in U.S.
UN makes emergency appeal for nearly $120M in aid for Haiti after 2.1 million affected
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C.— Hurricane Matthew has left at least 11 dead in North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory said Monday, pushing the death toll across the Southeast to at least 22 even as the weakening storm still carried dangers of flooding.
Five people also remained missing in Johnson and Cumberland counties, while thousands across North Carolina still lacked power after the storm struck Sunday with downpours and high winds in its slow march up the Atlantic Coast, McCrory told reporters.
McCrory warned that flooding remained an acute threat to people across central and eastern North Carolina.
“The people who live near rivers, streams and levees need to be extremely careful,” he warned, stressing that this would extend through much of the week.
He said that in Lumberton — a small city about 110 kilometres inland — about 1,500 residents were stranded by flooding, with some stuck on roofs.
“Helicopters, boats and swift water teams are going very heavily” to that area, McCrory said.
In the Caribbean, hundreds of deaths in Haiti have been attributed to the storm, and contaminated water is causing an outbreak of cholera there.
Meanwhile, the UN humanitarian agency in Geneva made an emergency appeal Monday for nearly $120 million in aid, saying about 750,000 people in southwest Haiti alone will need “life-saving assistance and protection” in the next three months. UN officials said earlier that at least 1.4 million people across the region need assistance and that 2.1 million overall have been affected by the hurricane. Some 175,000 people remain in shelters.
Electricity was still out in Haiti, with water and food both scarce, and officials said young men in villages along the road between the hard-hit cities of Les Cayes and Jérémie were building blockades of rocks and broken branches to halt relief convoys.
A convoy of food, water and medicine was attacked by gunmen in a remote valley where there had been a mudslide, said Frednel Kedler, coordinator for the Civil Protection Agency in the Grand-Anse Department, which includes Jérémie.
The National Civil Protection headquarters in Port-au-Prince raised the official nationwide death toll to 372, which included at least 198 deaths in Grand-Anse. But local officials have said the toll in GrandAnse alone tops 500.
The UN also said the hurricane has increased the risk of a “renewed spike” in the number of cholera cases. A cholera outbreak since 2010 has already killed roughly 10,000 people and sickened more than 800,000.
It can take from12 hours to five days for cholera symptoms to appear after ingesting contaminated food or water, according to the World Health Organization.
In North Carolina, McCrory said the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had issued temporary flight restrictions to keep the airspace over Lumberton clear for helicopters involved in rescue missions and pleaded with people not to send drones to the region. “I cannot stress that more,” he said. “The drone is a whole new technology, but it can be a very dangerous technology also in this type of situation.”
Across the region, officials have also blamed Hurricane Matthew for six deaths in Florida, three in Georgia and one death each in Virginia and South Carolina. Even after the storm was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone on Sunday and it moved out to sea, officials warned that the worst is not over. It could be days before waters crest and repair crews are able to reach all of those who have been affected, they said. Significant flooding continues in parts of South and North Carolina, according to the National Weather Service. Up to 50 centimetres of rain has been reported in some areas, with more expected.
“We warned that this was going to be like Hurricane Floyd,” McCrory said. “I was afraid we were exaggerating. Now, people in eastern North Carolina are telling us we may have underestimated it.”