The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Hurricane Matthew

  • Haiti: Death toll from hurricane rises to 372

    Haiti: Death toll from hurricane rises to 372

    The Civil Protection Directorate (DPC) has put the official death toll in Haiti from Hurricane Matthew to 372.

    The DPC on Tuesday in Port-au-Prince, during its updated assessment of the damage, said that four people were still missing and 246 others sustained injuries.

    “Some 175,509 people who were left homeless are being housed in 224 temporary shelters.

    “Haiti’s southernmost departments of Grande Anse and the South were the worst hit, with 198 and 78 fatalities, respectively,’’ it said.

    Unofficial figures put the death toll at more than 800.

    Meanwhile, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said it WAs scaling up its emergency response to help more than 350,000 people in need of immediate humanitarian help.

    UNFPA’s Executive Director, Babatunde Osotimehin, said that special focus would be on more than 8,400 women who are expected to give birth in the next three months.

    He noted that the hurricane had ravaged Haiti’s health infrastructure.

    Osotimehin said that Hurricane Matthew dealt a severe blow on Haiti’s health facilities, whether by flooding these centres or blowing off their roofs and putting them out of service.

    He said that to counter the lack of medical services, Cuba and Venezuela were sending more doctors to the island.

    Osotimehin disclosed that Cuba, which already has some 600 doctors working there, had sent an additional team of 38 physicians with experience in handling post-disaster problems.

    He said that officials had been concerned about a resurgence of cholera, which has already killed thousands in Haiti since an outbreak following the devastating 2010 earthquake that leveled much of Port-au-Prince.

    Meanwhile, Jorge Arreaza, Venezuelan Vice President for Social Development, on Monday presided over the shipment of another 20 tons of humanitarian aid, mainly medicine, to the battered island nation, and said an initial brigade of 40 doctors would also be heading to Haiti.

    A report said from last Wednesday, Venezuela sent in 450 tons of machinery to help clear away rubbles from streets and roadways, as well as hundreds of tons of food, water, tents, blankets and other basic needs.

    A report on the situation in Grande Anse by Food For The Poor, a Non-governmental Organisation (NGO), found that “towns and villages along the coast are completely devastated”.

    It added that animal and plant production had been completely devastated.

    The NGO warned of a “food shortage that would last at least six months,” and said the government needed to import materials and seeds to get farms up and running again.

  • Haiti hurricane death toll reaches 800

    The United Nations has warned it could take days for the full impact of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti to emerge, as the death toll soars to more than 800.

    The death toll has doubled, and may rise as rescue teams gain access to southern areas cut off by the storm, the BBC reports.

    The World Food Programme’s Carlos Veloso said some of the hard-hit towns can only be reached by air or sea.

    Many of the deaths in Haiti were in the south-western coast, which suffered the full force of the hurricane this week.

    Category Three Matthew, with sustained winds of 120mph (193km/h), is currently battering the coastline of the U.S state of Florida but it is not yet clear if it will make landfall.

    At 11:00 local time (15:00 GMT) Matthew was hugging the Florida coast, about 35 miles east of Daytona Beach and moving north-west at about 13mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

    Rescue efforts are under way to assess the destruction left in the wake of the most powerful Caribbean storm in a decade.

     

  • Hurricane Matthew: 100 killed in Haiti

    Hurricane Matthew has left 100 people dead in Haiti, the interior minister said on Thursday.

    One local official, speaking to AFP, said 50 people had died in the southern town of Roche-a-Bateau alone.

    New images from remote and cut off areas in the south-west of the country show scenes of devastation.

    The hurricane has again been upgraded to a Category Four storm, the second highest hurricane classification, as it heads for the U.S state of Florida, the BBC reports.

    Hurricane Matthew is already the deadliest Atlantic storm since 2012, when Hurricane Sandy directly killed at least 147 people.

    Sandy was a category three storm.

    Matthew is a category four, after being downgraded from category five – the highest classification.

  • Hurricane displaces thousands in Haiti

    The most powerful Caribbean hurricane in nearly a decade has left thousands of people displaced in Haiti, with rescuers struggling to reach the worst-hit areas.

    Hurricane Matthew is said to have devastated parts of the country, where at least two people have died, the BBC reports.

    The storm has now moved off the north-eastern coast of Cuba towards Florida, where warnings are in place.

    South Carolina is to start evacuating more than a million people.

    Matthew, now a category three hurricane, is predicted to hit the United States east coast later in the week.

    The hurricane also hit Cuba, but early reports suggested its impact was not as hard as in Haiti, where there were winds of 230km/h (145mph), heavy rain and dangerous storm surges.

    At least 10,000 people were in shelters and there were reports of overcrowded hospitals suffering shortages of fresh water, Mourad Wahba, the United Nations special representative for Haiti, said.

    The storm knocked down communications and blocked roads, hampering emergency efforts.