Haiti, Dominican flood toll nears 2,000

Haiti’s death toll stood at 1,660, including 1,000 in Mapou, 500 elsewhere in Haiti’s Southeast region, 158 in the riverside town of Fond Verettes, and two in the South, at Port-a-Piment.

Authorities in the neighbouring Dominican Republic said they had recovered 300 bodies, mostly from the disaster in Jimani near the Haitian border, where a river overflowed its banks before dawn and swept homes away as people slept.

In Haiti, troops from a US-led peacekeeping force flew helicopter loads of bottled water, fruit and bread to the town of Fond Verette, where the storm washed out the winding mountainside road from Port-au-Prince and cut off ground transportation to the town of 40,000,

The floodwaters flattened fields of crops and ripped apart crude shacks fashioned from sticks and sheets of iron. Residents pulled furniture and other belongings from the streets, where they had been swept by the flood, and assembled mud-caked possessions in stacks along the sides of the roads.

In the Dominican Republic, President Hipolito Mejia declared a day of national mourning for Thursday. In the devastated town of Jimani, bodies were taken from the mud and from Lago Enriquillo, a lake where they had been swept by the raging waters. Corpses were found crushed against walls, clinging to tree trunks and buried in the mud.

Dogs trained to sniff out bodies were sent to join the recovery effort. Relief workers wore surgical masks against the stench of decomposing flesh and hauled bodies on stretchers, while rescuers hacked through the rubble of stick shacks with hatchets searching for corpses. Many were buried in mass common graves. Several hundred people were also still missing. —Reuters