DOMINICAN REPUBLIC/HAITI: Rescue workers dug through mud and debris yesterday for survivors and bodies as the death toll from devastating floods and landslides in the Dominican Republic and neighbouring Haiti climbed to more than 600.
Several hundred more people were unaccounted for after Monday's rivers of mud and swirling waters smashed houses in their path.
The flooding followed days of torrential rain on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that the two countries share.
In the Dominican Republic, officials said the death toll had risen to 250, with almost all of the dead in Jimani, a town near the Haitian border where a river overflowed its banks before dawn and swept homes away as people slept.
In Haiti, the death toll was around 360. The dead included 158 at Fond Verettes, a town that was devastated by a river of mud, 200 in the south-east region and two in the south, at Port-a-Piment, the Haitian justice minister and acting interior minister, Mr Bernard Gousse, told Reuters.
"We are sending shelters and food supplies to affected areas," said Mr Gousse, who toured Fond Verettes on Tuesday.
Near Fond Verettes, floodwaters flattened fields of crops and swamped or tore apart crude shacks fashioned from sticks and sheets of iron. Roads in the town were littered with chunks of rock and gravel.
Residents pulled furniture and other belongings from the streets, where they had been swept by the flood, and assembled mud-caked possessions in stacks along the sides of the roads.
Troops from a US-led peacekeeping force in Haiti were helping relief efforts there. On Tuesday, the force flew helicopter missions of government officials, relief workers and supplies to Fond Verettes.
The disaster was a blow to Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, where the population of eight million already struggles to feed and shelter itself.
Four out of five people live in poverty and only one quarter of Haitians has access to safe drinking water.
The peacekeeping force, numbering about 3,500 foreign troops, was sent to Haiti to try to restore order after an armed revolt forced out former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February, the latest chapter in a long history of political upheaval in the country.
In the Dominican Republic, a country of 8.5 million people that is more prosperous than its neighbour but still has areas of deep poverty, relief workers and supplies of medicines, food, blankets were arriving into the Jimani area.