Jeanne death toll could rise to 2,000

TRUCKS dumped scores of bodies into a mass grave in a flood-ravaged Haitian city still littered with corpses, as officials said the death toll from Tropical Storm Jeanne rose to more than 1,070 and could rise to 2,000.

An estimated quarter million Haitians were left homeless.

Survivors who spent the night crammed into schools, churches and on rooftops slogged through contaminated ankle-deep mud in Gonaives yesterday, holding limes to their noses against the stench of putrefying bodies and overflowing latrines. People defecated on sidewalks.

"There are so many bodies, you smell them but you don't see them," said farmer Louise Roland. She said her rice and corn field was under water so she walked miles to town to try to get food.

Limited distribution by aid workers left most in the city of 250,000 still hungry, thirsty and increasingly agitated.

Officials said workers were digging more mass graves to bury bodies stacked outside morgues that are without electricity. Other workers were digging through mud to recover even more bodies.

There was no funeral ceremony when the bodies were dumped into a 14-foot-deep hole at sunset yesterday. Dozens of bystanders shrieked, and demanded officials collect bodies in nearby waterlogged fields.

Only a couple dozen bodies have been identified, and nobody was taking count at the site of the mass grave.

"We're demanding they come and take the bodies from our fields. Dogs are eating them," said local Jean Lebrun, listing demands made by residents in the neighbourhood whose opposition to mass graves had delayed burials.

Six days after the storm's passage, the 35-year-old farmer said: "We can only drink the water people died in."

Hurricane experts said today that Jeanne - now a 100-mph-hurricane - appeared set to do a loop over the Atlantic and zero in on the north-west and central islands of the Bahamas and then the south-east US coast, with forecasts putting Florida firmly in its sights. Landfall was possible Saturday.

Jeanne's rain-laden system proved deadly in Haiti, where more than 98% 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 10 feet high. Dieufort Deslorges, spokesman for the government's civil protection agency, said there still were dozens of unrecovered bodies.

"There are bodies in the water, in the mud and floating in houses that were covered by the floods."

The confirmed death toll rose to 1,072, with 1,013 bodies recovered in Gonaives alone by Wednesday, he said.

The number of people missing rose to 1,250, he added.

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.