• Submitted by: manso
• International
• 11 / 07 / 2010

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Haiti avoided another major crisis but with destroyed homes, crops and roads, Hurricane Tomas still brought pain to the struggling nation.

BY CURTIS MORGAN, TRENTON DANIEL AND JACQUELINE CHARLES.LES CAYES, Haiti -- President Rene Préval flew to the regions hardest hit by Hurricane Tomas on Saturday as weary earthquake refugees began salvaging the meager, muddy remains of their shattered lives.

In Leogane, leveled by the January quake and drowned under Tomas' worst flooding, residents picked through belongings, hung clothes and sheets in the newly arrived sun and trudged through thigh-high water running down the main road.

The consensus view from international aid groups, disaster managers and even the Haitian government was that the nation had been lucky this time, dodging the worst of Tomas and what many feared would be another massive catastrophe. The confirmed death toll through Saturday stood at eight, with two missing.

``If Tomas did not cause so many deaths, it is because we were lucky,'' Préval said. ``Tomas was not as strong as we expected.''

But hundreds of thousands of Haitians like Wilson Metellus did not feel fortunate. He'd lost his Leogane home to the quake and now Tomas had filled his crude tent with dirty water. ``There's nobody with a solution for this,'' said Metellus, 45, as he padded barefoot through mud.

RELATIVELY LUCK

The battered landscape under Préval's helicopter as he flew to meet with representatives from Les Cayes and other southwestern coast cities and then on to normally lush Grand-Anse underlined that Haiti's luck was relative.

There were no pancaked buildings or bodies in streets but it was still a disaster, particularly for a poor country burdened by a daunting rebuilding effort and struggling to contain a deadly cholera outbreak. Small coastal villages were swept away, roofs ripped off, tent cities turned to quagmires, roads washed out, crops ruined.

In Grand-Anse, residents greeted Préval with cries about destroyed homes and plantain plantations.

``The agriculture loss is total destruction,'' said Jean-Miranord Duververge, 46.

While there, Préval approached managers of OAS construction, a Brazilian company already working on a road from Camp Perrin to Jeremie and asked them to redirect trucks and equipment to repair washed out roads that had left some towns cut off.

``Can you help us with the roads?'' he asked in English. ``We want you to fix the roads, so you will stop what you are doing.''

With many rivers swollen by rushing water the color of chocolate, there also was concern that Tomas' damage wasn't done. A representative from near Jacmel reported two people were washed away by a river on Saturday.

``The big problem today is flooding -- massive flooding,'' said Leonard Doyle, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.


WORST COMBINATION

Drowning and mudslides weren't the only flood worry. Medical experts fear the flood waters also could be a vector for cholera, which has killed nearly 450 people and hospitalized nearly 7,000 with fever, diarrhea and vomiting in the last month.

``Water and cholera is the worst combination you can have,'' Doyle said.

Downgraded to a tropical storm, Tomas blew through the Turks and Caicos Islands overnight doing no serious damage, and posed no further threat to land as it headed into the Atlantic Ocean.

Norman Cox, a store owner on South Caicos, where 75-mph Tomas finally made landfall after threading between Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti, said a boat suffered some minor damage when it washed ashore and his roof lost shingles in two spots.

In nearby Grand Turk, Darron Williams, an assistant superintendent of police, said he counted one downed light pole and one downed tree.

``It wasn't much,'' he said. ``Listening to the Weather Channel will give you the impression we were going to get it bad. We didn't.''

But even after it passed Haiti, Tomas still managed to extend its misery to Port-au-Prince. The capital city, packed with some 1.4 million living in makeshift settlements since the earthquake, had stayed relatively dry when Tomas brushed the southwestern tip of the island on Friday. Early Saturday, the heaviest rains came, flooding and destroying tents in some encampments.

In Leogane -- where a billboard above the flood waters urged Haitians to vote in the Nov. 28 elections with the slogan ``Yes, we're voting for Haiti to become more beautiful'' -- the storm sparked residents to stage several protests about their living conditions.

Charles reported from Les Cayes, Daniel from Leogane and Morgan from Miami.

Source: The Miami Herald, CURTIS MORGAN, TRENTON DANIEL AND JACQUELINE CHARLES.
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