Death and despair in flood-hit Haitian city

BODIES lay in growing piles outside mortuaries yesterday as United Nations peacekeepers planned the first major distribution of food and water in Haiti.

The country has been devastated by floods that tore apart families and left hungry crowds that have mobbed truckloads of aid.

The death toll from deluges unleashed by Tropical Storm Jeanne climbed to more than 700, Haitian officials said, with more than 600 of them in Gonaives alone. More than 1,000 others were declared missing.

Carcasses of pigs, goats and dogs still floated in muddy waters slowly receding from the streets in Gonaives, Haiti’s third-largest city, with a population of 250,000. Not a house escaped damage. The homeless sloshed through the streets carrying belongings on their heads, while people with houses that still had roofs tried to dry scavenged clothes.

Flies buzzed around bloated corpses piled high at the city’s three mortuaries. The electricity was off, and the stench of death hung over the city.

Relatives waited outside a mortuary set up in the flood-damaged general hospital all day to identify and bury victims but vehicles to carry bodies to the cemetery never arrived. Most bodies remained unidentified.

Red Cross volunteers put more than 100 bodies into body bags, leaving them in a pile outside the mortuary.

“We’re going to start burying people in mass graves,” said Toussaint Kongo-Doudou, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

Waterlines up to 10 feet high on the buildings in Gonaives marked the worst of the storm that sent torrents of water and mudslides down denuded hills, destroying homes and crops.

Dieufort Deslorges, spokesman for Haiti’s civil protection agency, said he expected the death toll to rise as reports came in from outlying villages and rescuers dug through mudslides and rubble.

Mr Deslorges said rescue workers reported recovering 691 bodies - about 600 of them in Gonaives and more than 40 in northern Port-de-Paix.

Noel Madiro Morilus, director of Terre Neuve agriculture department, said 17 people died in that farming centre north of Gonaives.

“Certainly there are more than 700 dead,” Mr Deslorges said.

“It appears many were swept away to the sea, there are bodies still buried in mud and rubble, or floating in water, and that’s not to mention the hundreds who are missing and the places we have not yet been able to reach.”

Some 1,056 people were missing, almost all from Gonaives, Mr Deslorges said.

Mr Deslorges said 250,000 people were homeless across the country, and the storm destroyed at least 4,000 homes and damaged unknown thousands more.

Eight helicopters from a Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping force shuttled shipments of water, food and supplies to Gonaives yesterday after Chilean troops found the road from the north impassable.

UN forces present in Haiti since February are helping with the relief effort. Lieutenant General Gaston Irigoyen, with the UN peacekeeping force, said troops planned to oversee distribution of food and water yesterday but that could produce a riot among survivors, many of whom said they had not eaten since the storm.