Nine people died at shelters, including two children, even as floodwaters from Hurricane Ike receded from Gonaives and a US Navy hospital ship equipped with helicopters and amphibious boats arrived in the capital to deliver food and water to cities still marooned by flooding.
But with most roads across the country still impassible, Haiti — and the world — still lacked a complete picture of the destruction, and desperation was setting in among people who have spent days in the floodwaters and mud.
A Red Cross truck trying to reach Les Cayes on Haiti’s southern coast had to turn back, one of many international aid efforts still struggling to leave the capital.
North of the capital, shelters across Gonaives sustained nine deaths on Monday, said Daniel Dupiton of the region’s civil protection department.
It was not immediately clear what caused those deaths.
Provisional shelters have been set up in schools, churches and homes on high ground, many with scant supplies or supervision.
“We cannot confirm that they died because of hunger,” said Vicky Delore Ndjeuga, a UN spokesman for the mission in Gonaives.
“We need to make an examination to make sure it was because of food,” Ndjeuga said,
The national death toll — which government officials said stood at 331 people in four tropical storms in less than a month — is sure to rise as more bodies surface in the mud.
Two more bodies were found Monday in coastal Cabaret, where 60 people died as mudslides and floods unleashed by a swollen river crushed homes in the middle of the night. Sixteen other people — mostly children reported missing by their parents — were being searched for in the wreckage, Cabaret civil defense director Henri Louis Praviel said.
Late on Monday, authorities confirmed 10 more deaths, five attributed to Ike and five to Tropical Storm Hanna.
There was still no word from many cities and remote areas cut off from contact.
In Gonaives, Police Commissioner Ernst Dorfeuille said his poorly equipped force — 15 officers for the city of 160,000 — had buried dozens of badly decomposed and unidentifiable corpses in graves outside the city.
“After three days, those bodies could not stay,” said Dorfeuille, adding he witnessed the burial of five people.
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