23257: (Chamberlain) Haiti-Jeanne (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By AMY BRACKEN

   GONAIVES, Sept 23 (AP) -- Hungry, thirsty and increasingly desperate
residents attacked each other in a panic to get scarce food and water
Thursday as workers struggled to bury hundreds of corpses six days after
the city was struck by Tropical Storm Jeanne.
   More than 1,100 were killed and 1,250 are missing, and the toll was
rising. The storm left 250,000 homeless in Haiti's northwest province,
which includes the port of Gonaives.
   Health workers feared an epidemic of disease in the country's
third-largest city from the unburied dead, overflowing raw sewage, lack of
potable water, and infections from injuries. Some people already were
falling ill.
   Police erected barbed wire around their station Thursday after shots
were fired at the station overnight.
   Most of the police also were left homeless by the floods and had only
one vehicle, and that one wasn't working, officer Louis Francois said.
Their helplessness enraged residents, who have started throwing rocks at
the few riot police the government sent in to help.
   "We were saved from the floods, but now my baby is sick," said Marilucie
Fortune, 30, who gave birth to a son in a slum last weekend, as Jeanne
pounded Haiti with torrential rain for 30 hours. Jeanne has since become a
hurricane, churning toward the Bahamas with 105 mph winds and a track that
forecasters say could lead to Florida this weekend.
   Haiti's civil protection agency said more than 900 people have been
treated for injuries, mostly cuts or gashes from debris. Medics from U.N.
peacekeeping troops have pitched in.
   The General Hospital -- still knee-deep in mud -- was out of commission,
medical supplies are running out, and some aid trucks were unable to reach
the city because part of the road was washed away.
   Hundreds of people pushed through a wooden barrier to crowd into
Gonaives' sole working clinic for treatment, where one doctor was on duty.
   Workers dug new mass graves for bodies half-buried in the mud, trapped
in collapsed homes or floating in floodwaters that still ran knee-deep in
places.
   "There are so many bodies, you smell them but you don't see them," said
farmer Louise Roland, who like many held a lime to her nose to mask the
stench.
   Some residents of the seaside slum of Carenage had grown so desperate to
get rid of the decaying corpses that they were burying the unidentified
victims in their backyards. That could cause yet another health hazard
since the bodies easily could be forced up from shallow seaside graves.
   "We need surgical masks, water and food," said Frantz Bernier, who was
burning tires to protest the lack of government help. "We don't have
anything."
   By Thursday, 1,105 bodies had been recovered -- the vast majority in
Gonaives -- with 1,250 missing and nearly 1,000 injured, according to
Dieufort Deslorges, spokesman for the government's civil protection agency.
   "It's a critical situation in terms of epidemics, because of the bodies
still in the streets, because people are drinking dirty water and scores
are getting injuries from debris -- huge cuts that are getting infected,"
said Francoise Gruloos, Haiti director for the U.N. Children's Fund.
   Martine Vice-Aimee, an 18-year-old mother of two whose home was
destroyed, said people already were "getting sick from the water."
   "They're walking in it, their skin is getting itchy and rashes. The
water they're drinking is giving them stomach aches," she said.
   Limited distribution by aid workers left most people still hungry and
thirsty.
   "We can only drink the water people died in," complained farmer Jean
Lebrun.
   Aid agencies have dry food stocked in Gonaives, but few have the means
to cook. Food for the Poor, based in Deerfield, Fla., said its truckloads
of relief were unable to reach the city Wednesday. Troops from the
Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping forcing were ferrying in supplies by
helicopter.
   Peacekeepers fired into the air Wednesday to keep a crowd at bay as aid
workers handed out loaves of bread -- the first food in days for some.
   Police said they feared attack by about 20 prisoners who escaped from
jail during the storm.
   The International Federation of Red Cross and Crescent Societies
appealed for $3.3 million to fund relief operations, and several nations
were sending help.
   The U.S. government will provide more than $2 million in immediate
disaster relief to Haiti's flood victims in the coming days, USAID
spokesman Jose Fuentes said.
   Haiti was especially susceptible to Jeanne's rain-laden system, because
more than 98 percent of the land is deforested and torrents of water and
mudslides smashed down denuded hills and into the city. Floodwater lines on
buildings went up to 10 feet high.
   The disaster follows devastating floods in May, along the
Haiti-Dominican Republic border, which left 1,191 dead and 1,484 missing in
Haiti and 395 dead and 274 missing on the Dominican side. The countries
share the island of Hispaniola.
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   On the Net:
   National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov
   Weather Underground storm site: http://www.wunderground.com/tropical