Horror in Haiti as toll rises to 900
PORT- AU- PRINCE ( Reuters) — Hurricane Matthew killed 900 people and displaced tens of thousands in Haiti.
The number of deaths in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, surged to 900 yesterday as information trickled in from remote areas previously cut off by the storm, according to a Reuters tally of death tolls given by officials.
At least three towns in the hills and coast of Haiti’s fertile western tip reported dozens of people killed, including the farming village of Chantal where the mayor said 86 people died, mostly when trees crushed houses. He said 20 others were missing.
“A tree fell on the house and flattened it. The entire house fell on us. I couldn’t get out,” said 27-year-old driver Jean-Pierre Jean-Donald.
“People came to lift the rubble, and then we saw my wife who had died in the same spot,” said Jean-Donald, who had been married for only a year. His young daughter stood by his side, crying “Mommy.”
While the capital and biggest city, Port-au-Prince, was largely spared, the south suffered devastation.
Aerial footage from the hardest- hit towns showed a ruined landscape of metal shanties with roofs blown away and downed trees everywhere. Brown mud from overflowing rivers covered the ground.
Herve Fourcand, a senator for the Sud department, which felt the full force of Matthew’s impact, said several localities were still cut off by flooding and mudslides.
A scene of desolation greeted visitors to Jeremie, a town of 30,000 people left inaccessible until Friday.
With power lines down, people have been cut off from the news for days since the storm struck Tuesday — and had yet to hear that a presidential election due to take place this weekend has been postponed.
Virtually all the town’s corrugated-iron homes have been destroyed, with only a few concrete buildings left standing.
“It was as if someone had a remote control and just kept turning the wind up higher and higher,” said Carmine Luc, a 22-year-old woman.
“When the roof of my house blew off, I clung to a wall with my left hand, and with my right, I held on with all my strength to my three-year-old child — who was screaming,” she said.
A ship carrying nine containers of food and medical supplies was headed for Dame Marie, further west in Grand’Anse department.
“It’s probably the hardest hit department and the conditions don’t allow for a helicopter to land there,” Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph told AFP.
“So we’re doing our best to help those affected.”
Convoys were headed to other affected areas by land, sea and air, he said, including two helicopters provided by the US military to transport 50 tons of water, food and medicine elsewhere in Grand’Anse.
Further south, Haiti’s thirdlargest town of Les Cayes was battered, its Sous-Roches district turned from a quiet beachfront neighborhood to a chaos of mud and shattered trees.
The river level has begun to drop, but its waters are still mixed with the storm surge that inundated the beach during the Category Four hurricane’s hours-long assault on Tuesday.
“I thought I was going to die. I looked death in the face,” said 36-year-old Yolette Cazenor, standing in front of a house smashed in two by a fallen coconut palm tree.
Over 10 hours, hurricaneforce wind blasts and heavy rain leveled all the crops in the community’s fields, promising lean months ahead even by Haiti’s impoverished standards.
Up to 80 percent of crops have been lost in some areas, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Around one million people are in need of urgent assistance, according to CARE France, a humanitarian group.
“They have nothing left except the clothes on their back,” it said.
As the toll climbed, pledges of aid flooded in, with the United States announcing it was sending a Navy ship, the USS Mesa Verde, whose 300 Marines will add to the 250 personnel and nine helicopters already deployed to Haiti.