At least 502 people have been killed and hundreds are missing following torrential rains and flooding in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, civil defense officials said.
At least 358 people were killed in Haiti, while another 144 people died in the Dominican Republic, officials said on Tuesday.
The two countries form the mountainous island of Hispaniola, which bore the brunt of 10 days of heavy rainstorms across much of the Caribbean.
PHOTO: AFP
Rescuers desperately searched for survivors in the Dominican border town of Jimani after a raging river carried away scores of sleeping women, children and men in the middle of the night. An estimated 135 people perished there.
Dominican authorities said 236 people were still missing in the floods and more than 13,000 people were left homeless after swollen rivers turned into torrents.
The Soleil River burst its banks in the early hours of Monday, sweeping away entire 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 all of 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.
At least 300 Haitian victims died in the border area with the Dominican Republic, the Haitian civil protection agency said.
Flash floods in Fonds Verette, northeast of the Haitian capital, killed at least 158 more people. The agricultural town of 45,000 is built on a dried riverbed.
In the southeast, Grand Gosier and Mapou Belle Anseof were also hard hit by flooding with around 100 people killed in each town.
Haitian President Boniface Alexandre, Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and members of the international stabilization force in Haiti flew over Fonds Verette by helicopter on Tuesday to survey the damage.
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.
The 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 drinking water and food 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 on Monday.
Forecasters said the rains were to continue until at least yesterday.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS