Haiti's official death toll from Tropical Storm Jeanne soared to more than 1,070 and could rise to 2,000, officials announced as aid workers started mass burials, with bodies rolling off dumptrucks into a deep grave in the city still littered with corpses.
There was no funeral ceremony as three trucks dumped scores of bodies into a 4m deep hole at sunset on Wednesday. Dozens of bystanders shrieked, held noses against the stench and demanded officials collect bodies in nearby waterlogged fields.
The confirmed death toll rose to 1,072 bodies recovered -- 1,013 in Gonaives alone -- according to Dieufort Deslorges, spokesman for the government's civil protection agency.
He said the number of people missing in the floods rose to 1,250.
Only a couple dozen bodies have been identified, and nobody was taking count as the site of the mass grave.
"We're demanding they come and take the bodies from our fields. Dogs are eating them," said bystander Jean Lebrun, listing demands made by residents of in the neighborhood whose opposition to mass graves had delayed burials.
"We can only drink the water people died in," the 35-year-old farmer said, listing a widespread demand for potable water in this city of 250,000, with parts still knee-deep in water five days after the storm's passage.
Hurricane experts said Wednesday that Jeanne -- now over the open Atlantic as a hurricane -- could loop around and head toward the Bahamas then threaten the storm-weary southeastern US as early as this weekend.
It was too soon to tell where or if Jeanne would hit, but the US National Hurricane Center in Miami warned people in the northwest and central Bahamas and southeastern US coast to beware of dangerous surf kicked up by Jeanne in coming days.
Jeanne's rain-laden system proved deadly in Haiti, where more than 98 percent of the land is deforested and torrents of water and mudslides smashed down denuded hills and into the city, destroying homes and crops. Floodwater lines on buildings went up to 3 meters high.
The disaster follows devastating floods in May, along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border, which left official tolls of 1,191 dead and 1,484 missing in Haiti and 395 dead and 274 missing on the Dominican side. The countries share the island of Hispaniola.
Survivors in Haiti's third largest city were hungry, thirsty, and increasingly desperate. UN peacekeepers fired into the air on Wednesday to keep a crowd at bay as aid workers handed out loaves of bread -- the first food in days for some.
Aid agencies have dry food stocked in Gonaives, but few have the means to cook. Food for the Poor, based in Deerfield, Florida, said its truckloads of relief were unable to reach Gonaives on Wednesday because roads were washed away and blocked by mudslides. Troops from the Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping forcing were ferrying in some supplies by helicopter.
"The situation is not getting better because people have been without food or water for three or four days," said Hans Havik, of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Lebrun said people were angry that officials were not helping them search for the missing. Rescue workers said Wednesday they were concentrating on getting in food and taking care of growing piles of bodies outside three morgues.
Deslorges said there still were dozens of unrecovered bodies.
"There are bodies in the water, in the mud, in collapsed houses and floating in houses that were absolutely covered by the floods,'' Deslorges said.
At the grave in Gonaives, Raoul Elysee of the Haitian Red Cross said between 100 and 200 were buried and the rest were buried yesterday.
The decomposing bodies have officials fearful of health risks. Havik said the contamination of water sources and flooding of latrines could cause an outbreak of waterborne diseases.
Martine Vice-Aimee, an 18-year-old mother of two whose home was destroyed, said people already were getting ill.
"People are getting sick from the water, they're walking in it, their skin is getting itchy and rashes. The water they're drinking is giving them stomach aches," she said. She stood in a long line but didn't know what she was waiting for outside Gonaives' Roman Catholic cathedral, where hours earlier aid workers had handed out the bread. She said she had been afraid to fight her way through the crowd.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS