Friday, Sep. 05, 2008

Flooding blocks aid in Haiti

Rescue workers can’t get food and water to starving Haitian city

GONAIVES, Haiti — The convoy rumbled out of the U.N. base toward a flooded, starving and seething city Thursday, carrying some of the first food aid since Tropical Storm Hanna drowned Gonaives in muddy water three days ago.

Hungry children at three orphanages were waiting for the canvas-topped trucks, loaded with warm pots of rice and beans and giant tanks of drinking water.

They still are waiting.

The convoy crept over mud-caked, semipaved roads past closed stores, overturned buses and women wading in water up to their knees with plastic tubs on their heads.

But after about 45 minutes a huge gouge marred the road. The floods had split the asphalt, and water ran through the 10-foot-wide gap.

The convoy turned around. And the children — like tens of thousands more in this increasingly desperate city — went another day without food.

Some 250,000 people are affected in the Gonaives region, including 70,000 in 150 shelters across the city, according to an international official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. Argentine Lt. Sergio Hoj estimated that half of Gonaives’ houses remained flooded Thursday.

Many houses were torn apart. Families huddled on rooftops, their possessions laid out to dry. Overturned cars were everywhere, and televisions floated in the brown water.

Gonaives lies in a flat river plain between the ocean and deforested mountains that run with mud even in light rains. Hanna swirled over Haiti for four days, dumping vast amounts of water, blowing down fruit trees and ruining stores of food as it swamped tin-roofed houses.

The official death toll rose to 61 Thursday as Hanna finally moved north with near hurricane-force winds on a path toward the southeastern U.S. coast.

In the chaos there was no way to know how many people might be dead, or how many had been driven from their homes. Two other storms killed 85 people in August, and forecasters warned that fearsome Hurricane Ike could hit Haiti next week.