Caribbean storms claim more than 250 lives
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AFP):
Floods and landslides after days of torrential rain have killed more than 250
people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with hundreds missing, officials
said Tuesday. Rescuers desperately searched
for victims in the Dominican town of Jimani after a raging river carrying away
scores of sleeping women, children and men in the middle of the night.
The Dominican Republic reported at least 104 people dead with 250 people
missing and 122 injured. Some 151 people have
been killed in Haiti, the country's civil protection services said. The toll
there was expected to rise. The two countries
form the mountainous island of Hispaniola which bore the brunt of 10 days of
heavy rain storms across much of the Caribbean.
Dominican authorities said more than 13,000 people had been left homeless
after swollen rivers turned into torrents. At
least 94 of the Dominican dead were in Jimani, in the southeastern province of
Independencia, the national emergency commission said.
The Soleil River burst its banks in the early hours of Monday, sweeping away
whole households. Swollen, mud-caked bodies,
many of them naked children, were piled in the local morgue as grief-stricken
relatives wept, television images showed.
Dorka Dotel lost her four children. "This is a terrible blow, terrible, they
are all gone," she wept. Dominican National
Emergency Committee chief Radhames Lora Salcedo said that for sanitary reasons
any dead that could not be quickly identified would be buried in mass graves.
Lora Salcedo said the river "wiped out the town", burying people or sweeping
them away as they slept. "The bodies of 23
women, 10 men, 26 girls and 17 boys are in the morgue at Jimani hospital,"
said the establishment's director, Francis Moquete.
The floods left large parts of the Dominican Republic without electricity as
power stations were damaged. Roads and crops were also devastated.
Swollen rivers caused similar devastation in Haiti, where the toll rose to
151. Flash floods in Fonds Verette, northeast
of the Haitian capital, killed at least 58 people, the Haitian civil
protection agency said. The agricultural town of 45,000 is based on the dried
bed of a river. A priest, Father Pierre
Etienne Belneau, said he spent the weekend on the roof of a house to escape
floods that he said had destroyed Fonds Verette.
Belneau arrived in the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Monday to raise the alarm.
A helicopter from the multi-national force that has been patrolling Haiti
since March, after President Jean Bertrand Aristide resigned and fled, took
the priest and emergency supplies to Fonds Verette on Tuesday, officials said.
About 30 people were reported dead in the Mapou Belle Anse zone of southeast
Haiti, near the border with the Dominican Republic, another 29 were killed in
Grand Gosier, 13 were killed in Thiotte in the same region, and 17 people were
swept away in the Bodary district, the agency said.
The heavy rains caused landslides across Haiti, caused widespread power cuts
and wiped out many desperately needed crops. The poorest country in the
Americas relies on international food aid to feed a huge proportion of the
population. Dominican authorities have also
appealed for food and drinking water for the Jimani region.
Other Caribbean islands also reported damage because of the rain.
In Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the main road from the capital,
Point-a-Pitre to Basse Terre was cut Monday.
Forecasters have said the rains will continue until at least Wednesday.
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