22063: (Hermantin)Miami-Herald-Toll tops 200 in island flooding (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Posted on Wed, May. 26, 2004


DOMINICAN REPUBLIC/HAITI


Toll tops 200 in island flooding

The death toll rose to at least 218 in the Dominican Republic and Haiti from
severe rainstorms that caused a swollen river to overflow.

BY MICHAEL DEIBERT AND NANCY SAN MARTIN

nsanmartin@herald.com


JIMANI, Dominican Republic - Survivors used their bare hands to dig into mud
for relatives and dozens of corpses were buried in a mass grave Tuesday as
the official death toll from weekend floods rose to 218 here and in
neighboring Haiti.

''I lost my daughter and her four children and I'm destroyed because I'm
without a family and without anything,'' Juan Féliz, 74, told Dominican
television.

Although media reports put the total death toll at more than 500, Dominican
officials reported 135 confirmed dead and 250 others missing and Haiti's
Interior Ministry reported 83 dead and 63 missing on its side of the
frontier.

''There were many people dying. Huge floods. Goats, cows, everything was
washed away,'' Marco Emmanuel, a peasant farmer from the Haitian village of
Fond Parisien, said as Red Cross volunteers administered first aid to
victims along the mud-caked road.

In the Dominican town of Jimaní, hardest hit by the storms that dumped nine
inches of rain on the region early Monday, several truckloads of mud-covered
and naked corpses were buried in a mass grave to prevent the spread of
diseases.

National Emergency Committee chief Radhamés Lora Salcedo said those were
bodies that were not identified or claimed by their relatives. Several dozen
identified bodies had already been taken away by relatives for proper
burials, he said.

IN HAITI

In Haiti, soldiers from the U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping mission
began flying food and other emergency supplies to villages devastated by the
rains that turned a trickling stream into a raging river, destroying homes,
washing out roadways, touching off landslides and leaving thousands without
drinking water or electricity.

''It pretty much flattened the entire area,'' U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Dave
Lapan, a spokesman for the peacekeepers, told The Herald in a telephone
interview. ``Cars, houses, buildings -- it's all leveled.''

The river blamed for the destruction is known as Río Sillié in the Dominican
Republic and Soleil in Haiti. Normally a narrow, virtually dry river bed
that stretches for about 20 miles from the Haitian village of Fond Verrettes
into Jimaní, the river grew to six times its breadth, officials reported.

450 HOMES

Its raging currents pulled trees from their roots, carried boulders down
from mountainsides and swept away more than 450 homes, many of them nothing
more than wooden shacks.

In Tomon, a Haitian farming village set in a steep valley between mountains,
stunned residents took stock of the damage and tried to console those who
lost loved ones. Roads remained under large puddles of water, corn fields
were destroyed and empty parcels marked the sites of houses washed away.

The three sons of Josette Manuel stood in one of the washed-away ruins of a
home.

''She drowned yesterday morning. I was looking all over for her,'' a
choked-up Gerard Joseph said after recovering his mother's body.

NOWHERE TO GO

Overhead, the mountain tops were obscured by dark, menacing clouds
threatening even more rain.

''You are in danger here,'' Claudy Chery, a Red Cross volunteer, told a
group of villagers.

Responded Ones Cantel: ``We don't have anywhere else to go.''

Those who still had homes standing scooped water from pools littered with
floating chairs, mattresses and other drenched furniture, according to
images broadcast by Dominican TV.

''Several villages were caught in the wrath of this thing,'' said U.S.
Marine Col. Glen Sachtleben, chief of staff for the combined Joint Task
Force Haiti, who flew over Fond Verrettes.

'As we looked at [the devastation], we thought, `Wow, this thing really
swept down and took real estate, property and people,' '' he said.

Although Haitian and Dominican authorities issued official casualty figures,
the exact number may never be known.

IMPRECISE COUNTS

Neither country has precise counts of its rural population, and authorities
acknowledged that some of the victims -- Haitians whose bodies were washed
down into Dominican territory -- may have been counted twice.

But many of the missing are likely buried under mud, rocks and other debris,
officials said. In Fond Verrettes alone, at least 58 residents were still
missing as of late Tuesday.

AROUND JIMANI

Most of the bodies recovered Tuesday were found near Jimaní, near the border
with Haiti. Many were Haitians who lived or worked in Jimaní or nearby
farming communities.

''I've looked at the bodies in the morgue and couldn't recognize any of
them,'' a stunned Jude Joseph, a Haitian whose nine family members were
missing, told The Associated Press.

``I don't know what to do. I've been left with nothing.''

AID DELIVERED

By late afternoon Tuesday, more than a dozen peacekeepers' military
helicopters had flown into Fond Verrettes to deliver 18,000 liters of water,
500 boxes of bread and 500 boxes of fresh fruit. The village is home to
about 4,000 people, Lapan said.

About 300 Dominican soldiers and 25 ambulances were sent from the capital of
Santo Domingo to assist in emergency efforts.

Herald writer Nayiva Blanco in Miami and special correspondent Alba Reyes in
Santo Domingo contributed to this report.

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