AMID a hellish landscape of roofless shacks, shrouded bodies and torrents of tainted brown water, the death toll in Haiti from Hurricane Matthew climbed into the hundreds on Friday as the storm’s full impact became grimly apparent.
Three days after the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation was battered by 140 miles per hour gales and torrential rains, reports of devastation trickled in from hard-hit, hard-to-reach villages and towns in the country’s remote southwest—a slender peninsula that juts, fatefully, into the Caribbean and the hurricane’s path.
The official death toll stood at 283, according to the Interior Ministry, but news agency tallies, citing figures obtained from municipalities, ranged to more than 800, as international aid agencies and Western governments struggled to rush in desperately needed supplies.
Relief workers stressed that with patchy cell-phone service and many areas still cut off by washed-out roads and bridges, it could be days before a reliable death toll emerged—or a full picture of how many more Haitians are in immediate peril.
For some who already had so little, wind and water snatched away whatever remained.
“I have nothing—my hands are empty,” Kimberly Janvier told the Reuters news agency in the already ragged western town of Cavaillon, which was left in ruins.
Hunger, homelessness and disease swiftly emerged as potent threats in cities and the countryside alike. In the ravaged southwest departments of Sud and Grand’Anse alone, at least 29,000 homes were destroyed, officials said.
“We fear that the numbers are going to increase considerably as emergency teams advance,” said Jean-Claude Fignole, Haiti program director for the international aid agency Oxfam. Clean water, food and basic supplies were all urgently needed, he said.
In Jeremie, the main town in Grand’Anse, the hurricane ripped off corrugated metal roofs and leveled homes. Aerial footage showed the destruction of about 80 percent of the buildings in the city of 31,000 people.
Residents of the town described a terrifying ordeal as the storm blew through, dodging flying sheets of corrugated metal as they fled in search of safety.
“When the roof of my house flew away, I clung to a wall with my left hand and with my right hand,” 22-year-old Carmine Luc told Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper. “I held firmly onto my child of three months, who was crying with all his might.”
Others told of seeing people left injured and bleeding by airborne debris. “The wind was so strong, it was knocking us over,” Fritznel Antoine, a father of three, told the paper.
In impoverished villages where people survive on subsistence farming, the wreckage pointed to misery yet to come: the bloated corpses of drowned livestock and tangles of uprooted crops, representing a crucial loss of livelihood.
Basic foodstuffs became black-market commodities; in Jeremie the price of rice doubled overnight.
Although Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, was not as badly hit, many families lost belongings and suffered damage to their homes. Even before the hurricane tore through, as many as 60,000 Haitians were living in tents and other makeshift structures in the capital after losing their homes in a calamitous earthquake in 2010.
“The water in the house was up to my waist,” Marcele Duby, who lives in the city’s Truitier neighborhood, told Oxfam. “If it had occurred in the middle of the night, I would have lost my children. But it was broad daylight, so I could save them.”
Many streets in the low-lying areas of the city remained underwater on Friday.
International efforts gathered pace. The US sent 350 Defense Department personnel and nine helicopters. Germany, Spain and Canada also joined the rescue-and-relief effort.
France, the onetime colonial power, dispatched a Falcon 50 surveillance plane from nearby Martinique on Wednesday to help assess the damage, and French officials were chartering a plane to send in 60 civil-security personnel and 32 tons of aid, including water-purification equipment and medical supplies.
Water sanitation was an enormous concern in a country that has already seen some 10,000 deaths in a cholera epidemic that erupted in 2010. With creeks and rivers having overflowed their banks, rescue workers told of pit latrines subsumed by floodwaters and graves unearthed in the torrent.
Children, as in catastrophes elsewhere, were poised to suffer disproportionately, vulnerable to water-borne diseases and malnutrition. An estimated half a million children live in two administrative departments at the heart of the hurricane zone, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Florida largely spared from storm’s wrath
A slight wobble in the track of Hurricane Matthew on Friday saved Florida from potential catastrophe, and, instead, turned the storm into a giant wind and rain machine that knocked down power lines, uprooted trees and left two people dead.
But the legacy of the powerful hurricane was still undetermined as it continued its brutal path up the US coastline. There were projections of perilously surging seas and serious flooding in some of the South’s most historic cities, including Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina.
“We are very concerned about storm surge,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said at an early Friday evening news briefing. “We have seen flooding in Saint Augustine. There is the potential for a significant chance of flooding in Jacksonville. The flooding in this area could potentially last for days, and river flooding could last even longer.”
The National Weather Service said tide levels in South Carolina could reach or exceed those that occurred in October of 2015, when record rainfall led to major flooding and the deaths of almost 20 people.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Friday was urging Charleston residents to leave town, an appeal that was echoed by Mayor John Tecklenburg.
“It really goes against my grain and against my nature to be inhospitable, but we’re asking everyone to please leave town,” Tecklenburg said at a news conference. “It’s that time.”
More than 2.5 million people in four states evacuated their homes before the storm hit the US.
The break Florida needed occurred shortly before midnight on Friday, when the hurricane, by then a Category 3, jogged eastward just enough to keep the eye of the storm and its 120-mph winds offshore.
The storm continued to follow the Florida coastline throughout the day before taking a slight turn to the north-northeast, as if it were trying to mirror the north Florida-south Georgia coastline.
Matthew was downgraded to a Category 2 storm by Friday night, with winds closer to 100 mph. It was scheduled to reach Charleston by Saturday morning.
There were four deaths in Florida, two considered indirect storm-related fatalities.
Los Angeles Times/TNS
Image credits: AP/Dieu Nalio Chery