Hurricane Matthew Makes Old Problems Worse for Haitians
By AZAM AHMEDOCT. 6, 2016
The first reports to arrive were of vast flooding and destruction, rivers of brown water pulsing through streets and homes shorn of tin roofs. Eventually, the talk turned to livestock lost, a veritable fortune for those living in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
But three days after the worst storm to strike Haiti in more than 50 years, the death toll is rising, and fast. From initial estimates of five dead, the government is now saying more than 280 people have been killed in Hurricane Matthew and its aftermath, the worst natural disaster to strike the nation since the earthquake of 2010.
The storm left a broad tableau of devastation: houses pummeled into timber, crops destroyed and stretches of towns and villages under several feet of water. In the southern city of Jérémie, 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed.
The numbers of known dead soared as officials and aid workers ventured deeper into areas cut off from rescue efforts in the south, discovering more bodies interred in flooded homes and streets. Until Thursday, there had been no connection to the south of the country — neither electronic nor physical, owing to severed phone lines and collapsed bridges.
“This is a very, very partial assessment of the damage and death,” said Annick Joseph, the country’s interior minister, during a news conference earlier in the day. Among other things, he added, dead were also being discovered in the mountains of the country, where communities are more isolated.
The sudden surge in numbers reflects, in some ways, the very nature of the many challenges that Haiti faces. The country’s infrastructure had been in decline for decades, even before the earthquake and other storms weakened it further. A fragile communications system, too, was unreliable even in the best of times.
These challenges and others are part of the reason the government so vastly underestimated the number of deaths, and why, many think, the number will continue to rise. More fundamentally, it meant that there was little the government was capable of doing to prepare — and to respond.
“That many people died because they never believed what the authorities told them when they said they had to evacuate,” said Jean Senozier Despreux, who lives and works in Les Cayes and weathered the storm there. “They resisted it.”
In a telephone interview, he said the surge in death numbers was not surprising to him. “We knew we would continue find people under the rubble,” he said. “It was so intense there was no way out.”
Enzo di Taranto, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, said there would “be a severe impact on the environment, agriculture and water systems.”
“Schools, hospitals and police stations, everything that was there when the hurricane hit was in some way damaged, because of the strengths of the wind,” Mr. di Taranto said.
On Wednesday, officials said the hurricane’s heavy damage had forced them to postpone an already-delayed presidential election set for Sunday in the country of 11 million.
This latest disaster revives unresolved questions that continue to haunt the country from the 2010 earthquake, when international aid groups practically usurped the role of the government.
The government has been clear that this time around it will take the lead on coordinating aid, as donors bring in fresh water, food and money. Yet that approach, too, has its limitations.
The current government is an interim administration that was to be replaced in the Sunday election. There is no word on when that vote will be rescheduled.
For international aid organizations, striking a balance between working with the government and delivering lifesaving assistance expeditiously will define the coming months of the crisis, many say.
“There was a lot of taking stock of what lessons were learned after 2010,” said Jake Johnston, research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
“And then you see a disaster and it all goes out the window and it’s immediate, whatever we can do as fast as possible,” he said.
At the same time, he said, for donors, “bypassing the government is not going to save the day in the end.”
Aid groups especially fear cholera, a waterborne infection that has stubbornly plagued Haiti since shortly after the earthquake, when it was believed to have been inadvertently introduced by United Nations peacekeepers assigned to the country.
CARE Haiti, a charity, said in a report that three cases of cholera had already turned up in southern peninsula hospitals. Partners in Health, an international charity that has long worked in Haiti, said there had been 26,000 cases of cholera this year.
According to the United Nations, more than one million people have been affected by the storm in Haiti — and at least a third of them will require humanitarian assistance.
Mr. di Taranto’s United Nations office, which is helping coordinate assistance between the government and humanitarian groups, said that more than 15,000 people were in emergency shelters.
The Civil Protection Force of Haiti put the figure countrywide at closer to 27,000 people, with the majority in the south. At least 20,000 homes were wrecked and hundreds of Haitians were injured, officials said.
In the largest banana-growing area of the country, more than 80 percent of the crops that feed 20,000 families were destroyed by the winds and flooding, according to Mercy Corps.
In Jérémie, the capital of the southern department of Grande Anse, there was near-total destruction.
In Les Cayes, another southern area where the storm wrought the most damage and across the peninsula from Jérémie, people lost their homes, livestock and possessions.
Southerners in particular rely on subsistence farming, on lands that have now been flooded.
“We’re very worried about the country’s future in terms of food security,” said Hervil Cherubin, country director in Haiti for Heifer International, a nonprofit that works with more than 6,500 farming families in the south. “Most of the crops are gone. Many of the farm fields are like landfills. They’re full of trash, seawater, gravel and other debris.”
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