Aid finally lands as Haiti counts cost of disaster
Print Edition
A SMALL airstrip at the edge of town hums with activity. Aid convoys are arriving from the capital, now that some roads washed out by Hurricane Matthew have been cleared. A barge carrying food and water is moored offshore.
An international response to the staggering blow delivered by Hurricane Matthew to southwestern Haiti is finally getting under way even as Port-au-Prince authorities try to gauge the full extent of the death and destruction.
Haiti began three days of formal national mourning yesterday under a decree issued by President Jocelerme Privert, even as aid began to move toward flattened communities.
“It’s beginning to pick up now,” said Stephane Rolland, a regional coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross, as workers unloaded blankets, soap, bleach and other critical items in Jeremie on Saturday.
There are clearly limits, though, including the fact that the airstrip in Jeremie is unable to accommodate large cargo planes, and only operates in the daytime. Many of the villages in the southwestern peninsula are difficult to reach. And people are growing increasingly desperate after losing everything when the storm ripped through the area last Tuesday.
The precise death toll from the storm remained uncertain. Guillaume Silvera, a senior official with the Civil Protection Agency in the Grand-Anse Department, which is on the tip of the southern peninsula and includes the city of Jeremie, said they had confirmed 522 deaths, not including anyone in several remote communities that they have yet to reach because of collapsed roads and bridges.
“We think the numbers will have to go up,” Silvera said.
Government officials estimate that at least 350,000 people need assistance, and concern was growing over an increase in cholera cases following widespread flooding unleashed by Matthew. An ongoing cholera outbreak has already killed roughly 10,000 people and sickened more than 800,000 since 2010, when the infectious disease was introduced into the country’s biggest river from a UN base where Nepalese peacekeepers were deployed.
Maria Sofia Sanon, a health worker overseeing the open-air cholera treatment center in a corner of Jeremie’s main hospital, said they were ill-equipped to deal with patients. The area was strewn with broken tree branches, and a group of young mothers sat outside holding up the arms of their glassy-eyed children being rehydrated via IVs.
“They’re not supposed to be in the sun, but we have no more beds,” Sanon said.
The World Food Program says there has been massive destruction of crops. Hospitals and clinics have been damaged or destroyed as they struggle to deal with an increase in patients with injuries sustained during the storm as well as an apparent increase in cholera. UNICEF said that in Grand Anse alone there were 66,000 houses destroyed and 20,000 heavily damaged. “Information gathered from various sources in the field suggests that the human toll (dead and injured) will be heavier than the current official figures,” the agency said in a report.
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