Wednesday, September 22, 2004
More than 100 bodies were stacked up outside the morgue.
GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) -- Bodies lay in growing piles outside morgues as U.N. peacekeepers planned the first major distribution of food and water today in this city devastated by floods that have torn apart families and left hungry crowds that have mobbed truckloads of aid.
The death toll from deluges unleashed by Tropical Storm Jeanne climbed to more than 700, Haitian officials said Tuesday, with more than 600 of them in Gonaives alone. More than 1,000 others were declared missing.
Floating animals
Carcasses of pigs, goats and dogs still floated in muddy waters slowly receding from the streets in Gonaives, Haiti's third-largest city with some 250,000 people. Not a house escaped damage. The homeless sloshed through the streets carrying belongings on their heads, while people with houses that still had roofs tried to dry scavenged clothes.
Flies buzzed around bloated corpses piled high at the city's three morgues. The electricity was off, and the stench of death hung over the city.
Bodies unidentified
Relatives waited outside a morgue set up in the flood-damaged General Hospital all day to identify and bury victims. But vehicles to carry bodies to the cemetery never arrived. Most bodies remained unidentified.
Destilor Aldajus, a 50-year-old farmer, said he and his six children climbed onto their roof to escape the floods. But he was at the morgue looking for his wife.
"I couldn't find her, but I knew the water had taken her," he said.
Red Cross volunteers put more than 100 bodies into body bags, leaving them in a pile outside the morgue.
"We're going to start burying people in mass graves," said Toussaint Kongo-Doudou, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
Renel Corvil, a 32-year-old farmer, said he had come to the morgue every day since Saturday to look for his four missing children. On Tuesday, he found them. But after waiting all day for bodies to be taken to the cemetery, he left to bury a fifth child that already had been transported to the graveyard.
As they waited, survivors exchanged tales. "Everyone in my neighborhood who survived had climbed a tree," Corvil said.
Waterlines up to 10 feet high on Gonaives' buildings marked the worst of the storm that sent torrents of water and mudslides down denuded hills, destroying homes and crops.
Toll expected to rise
Dieufort Deslorges, spokesman for Haiti's civil protection agency, said he expected the death toll to rise as reports come in from outlying villages and rescuers dig through mudslides and rubble.
Deslorges said rescue workers reported recovering 691 bodies -- about 600 of them in Gonaives and more than 40 in northern Port-de-Paix. Noel Madiro Morilus, director of Terre Neuve agriculture department, said 17 people died in that farming center north of Gonaives.
"Certainly there are more than 700 dead, certainly there are dozens more dead," Deslorges told the AP. "It appears many were swept away to the sea, there are bodies still buried in mud and rubble, or floating in water, and that's not to mention the hundreds who are missing and the places we have not yet been able to reach."
Some 1,056 people were missing, almost all from Gonaives, Deslorges said.
Homelesss
Deslorges said some 250,000 people were homeless across the country, and the storm destroyed at least 4,000 homes and damaged unknown thousands more.
Eight helicopters from a Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping force shuttled shipments of water, food and supplies to Gonaives on Tuesday after Chilean troops found the road from the north impassable, said Argentine Lt. Col. Gaston Irigoyen, a spokesman.