PORT-AU-PRINCE – Hurricane Tomas soaked crowded Haitian earthquake survivors’ camps with overnight rain as the re-strengthened storm headed north yesterday between Cuba and Haiti amid fears of flooding and landslides.
One person died trying to cross a river in the Grande-Anse region southwest of the capital and some flooding was reported in the south coast town of Les Cayes, said Alta Jean-Baptiste, Haiti’s civil protection director.
In the capital Port-au-Prince, still scarred from a devastating January 12th earthquake, hundreds of thousands of homeless quake survivors spent the night under rain-drenched tent and tarpaulin shelters in muddy encampments. The quake killed more than one-quarter of a million people.
With the passage of Tomas, the United Nations and relief agencies have gone on maximum alert to prepare for the risk of another humanitarian catastrophe in the western hemisphere’s poorest nation, already reeling from a deadly cholera epidemic on top of the widespread quake destruction.
But there were no immediate reports of serious storm destruction or major casualties.
“We have escaped pretty lightly so far. It’s not as bad as we had feared,” Leonard Doyle, spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration, said after receiving reports from field offices around the country.
Only some of the 1.3 million earthquake survivors in the capital’s temporary camps were able to evacuate to more secure structures with family or friends, or in schools or government shelters.
Wind from Tomas blew over tents at camps for displaced people in the southern coastal city at Jacmel. Swollen seas caused a limited amount of flooding on the south coast, the government and aid workers said.
At 11am, Tomas was moving northeastward to the west of Haiti, about 230km from Port-au-Prince, packing top sustained winds of 140 km/h, the US National Hurricane Centre said.
It had earlier reintensified over the Caribbean sea into a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, heading on a track that would take it near or over eastern Cuba, the Turks and Caicos Islands and southeastern Bahamas.
In the capital, Haitians long used to harsh tropical weather were shrugging off the overnight rain. “It rained but it was a normal night and I slept,” said ice cream seller Zaporte N’Zanou, who passed the night in the Champs de Mars camp in front of the wrecked presidential palace. But forecasters were warning rainfall from Tomas could produce flash flooding and mudslides in Haiti.
Rains, floods and mudslides in 2004 and 2008 killed several thousand people in Haiti, especially in the northwest city of Gonaives.
With the storm threat and the spreading cholera epidemic, Haiti faces major disruption less than a month before November 28th elections.
The UN said the storm almost certainly will exacerbate a cholera epidemic that has killed 442 people and sickened more than 6,700. – (Reuters)