Haiti began three days of mourning yesterday for hundreds killed in Hurricane Matthew as relief officials grappled with the unfolding devastation in the Caribbean country’s hard-hit south.
Matthew was downgraded yesterday to a post-tropical cyclone after cutting a swath from Florida to North Carolina that left at least 17 dead.
As of 1500GMT, the storm was packing 120km per hour winds as it moved away from the North Carolina coastline, although it was still described as packing a punch.
Behind it lay widespread flooding, washed out roads, downed power lines and trees and other havoc.
Still, the US seems to have dodged a bullet: as recently as Thursday night the predictions of storm damage bordered on the apocalyptic.
Attention shifted back to Haiti, the Americas’ poorest country and one shattered by a 2010 earthquake and ravaged by a cholera epidemic.
Matthew crashed ashore on Haiti’s southern coast on Tuesday as a monster Category 4 storm, packing 230km winds.
Civil defence officials have put the death toll at 336, although some officials said it topped 400.
As southern Haiti has a population of 1.3mn, with a poverty rate of 60% to 70%, “we are not far from having 1mn people who are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance,” said Mourad Wahba, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Haiti.
Aerial footage from the hardest-hit towns showed a ruined landscape of metal shanties with roofs blown away, downed trees everywhere and mud from overflowing rivers covering the ground.
The hurricane destroyed at least 80% of crops in some areas, so people will head from the countryside into cities. And the slums of cities like Port-au-Prince and even towns in the south will only grow and worsen, said Wahba.
He warned, therefore, that aid must not target only cities and towns but also go to farmers to keep them working their land.