22076: (Chamberlain) Dominican, Haiti floods death toll rises to 600 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>
kSubject: (Chamberlain)  Dominican, Haiti floods death toll rises to  600

     By Manuel Jimenez

     SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic, May 26 (Reuters) - Rescue workers
dug through mud and debris on Wednesday for survivors and bodies as the
death toll from devastating floods and landslides in the Dominican Republic
and neighboring Haiti climbed to more than 600.
     Several hundred more people were unaccounted for after Monday's rivers
of mud and swirling waters smashed houses in their path. The flooding
followed days of torrential rain on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that
the two countries share.
     In the Dominican Republic, officials said the death toll had risen to
250, with almost all of the dead in Jimani, a town near the Haitian border
where a river overflowed its banks before dawn and swept homes away as
people slept.
     In Haiti, the death toll was about 360.
     The dead included 158 at Fond Verettes, a town that was devastated by
a river of mud, 200 in the southeast region and 2 in the south, at
Port-a-Piment, Haitian Justice Minister and acting Interior Minister
Bernard Gousse told Reuters.
     "We are sending shelters and food supplies to affected areas," said
Gousse, who toured Fond Verettes on Tuesday.
     Near Fond Verettes, floodwaters flattened fields of crops and swamped
or tore apart crude shacks fashioned from sticks and sheets of iron. Roads
in the town were littered with chunks of rock and gravel.
     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. The floods toppled a cross near a
Voodoo temple.
     Troops from a U.S.-led peacekeeping force in Haiti were helping relief
efforts there. On Tuesday, the force flew helicopter missions of government
officials, relief workers and supplies to Fond Verettes.
     The disaster was a blow to Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas
where the population of 8 million already struggles to feed and shelter
itself. Four out of five people live in poverty and only one quarter of
Haitians has access to safe drinking water.
     The peacekeeping force, numbering about 3,500 foreign troops, was sent
to Haiti to try to restore order after an armed revolt forced out former
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February, the latest chapter in a long
history of political upheaval in the country.
     In the Dominican Republic, a country of 8.5 million people that is
more prosperous than its neighbor but still has areas of deep poverty,
relief workers and supplies of medicines, food, blankets were pouring into
the Jimani area.
     Dogs trained to sniff out bodies were sent to join the rescue effort.
Relief workers wearing surgical masks hauled bodies on stretchers, while
rescuers hacked through the rubble of stick shacks with hatchets searching
for survivors.
     Corpses, many caked with mud, were stretched under sheets or piled on
the floor of a morgue and coffins were stacked at the side of the road
outside.
     More than 100 bodies were buried in a common grave in Jimani on
Tuesday. Health officials worried about diseases breaking out and urged
quick burials.
     The force of the flood waters in Jimani carried some people for miles
(kms). Some people, including a 15 year-old boy, were rescued alive from
Lago Enriquillo, a lake outside Jimani, said Alcibiades Moreta, a regional
official for a volunteer group called Citizens Taking Part.
     Lora Salcedo said that some 239 people were listed missing. But local
residents believed the number of people unaccounted for could be as many as
500.
     On Tuesday night, authorities evacuated about 1,000 families from a
low-lying area in the southwest of the country as a river rose there. But
the Dominican weather service said that the rains  would start to ease off
soon.
     The European Union was preparing a package worth two million euros
($2.43 million) for victims of floods in the Dominican Republic and Haiti,
the European Commission said in Brussels.

  (Additional reporting by Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince)