Haitians huddling together in the open after the killer earthquake are bracing for a new natural menace — the Caribbean’s notoriously heavy rainy season, which is already causing deadly flooding in the country.
Flooding in the southwest, in and around Haiti’s third-biggest city of Les Cayes that was untouched by the January quake which leveled the capital Port-au-Prince, killed 13 people at the weekend, emergency service officials said.
Some 3,000 people were also evacuated in the sudden inundations that were the first early sign of Haiti’s wet season, which is to bring its full force to bear next month or May.
PHOTO: AFP
For the million people left homeless in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding area, the storms — that also trigger mudslides and cause rivers to break their banks — are likely to heap woe on already unbearable living conditions.
UN aid relief coordinators say 400,000 tents and tarpaulins will have been distributed by then, but even if most people are shielded from the monsoon-like downpour, the fields they are living in will be turned into unsanitary mud baths.
Residents and health officials fear diseases will propagate.
“We have homes out here. In Port-au-Prince, they don’t. They’re in the street,” businessman Gilou Saneglin Goin said in Les Cayes as he surveyed the mess left by the flooding on Sunday.
“All the dead bodies that are in the broken houses. What are they going to do with them? All the smell, all the disease. You’re drinking that same water, you’re bathing in that same water. All you’re going to have is sickness,” he said.
Doctors at Les Cayes’ hospital said that each year they are left helpless by the rising waters.
On Saturday, they had to hastily move up to 400 patients out of their ground-floor beds and crowd them into balconies and rooms on the upper floors, where mattresses were thrown on the floor.
“We’re really in a difficult situation, the patients are in a really difficult situation,” one doctor, Georges Emanise, said as she checked IV drips and the status of her charges.
Several elderly patients were sleeping fitfully as other patients and staff took care of them, in some cases using rags to shoo away flies and mosquitos.
The health director for Haiti’s southern region, doctor Serge Louissaint, said malaria was a regular hazard during the rainy season — and this year it would be worse.
“We’re expecting a sharp rise in the number of malaria cases. Each rainy season is like that. It’s only going to aggravate the situation in Haiti,” he said.
Louissaint added that he had been asking in vain for years for Haiti’s national authorities to relocate the hospital to higher ground.
Emanise said that this year’s rainy season would add to the post-earthquake challenges faced by health officials in the capital.
There, she said, would likely be “all types of infections — respiratory infections, the flu and for girls, vaginal infections.”
She also said runoff flowing over corpses still trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings would “poison all the others” as it made its way into the water supply.
Les Cayes doctors appealed for the international aid organizations at work in Haiti to help mitigate the effects the rains would have on the vulnerable and exposed population, both in the capital and elsewhere in the country.
Saneglin Goin, however, said Haiti’s pervasive corruption would likely siphon off their energies and money.
“It’s dog eat dog, man, everybody for themselves. That’s not the way it’s meant to be, but that’s the way it is,” he said.
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