Flooding in Haiti from three major storms has killed scores of people and "washed away" progress toward dealing with ongoing food shortages, the top-ranking U.N. humanitarian official said Friday.
Haiti's flooding from three major storms in as many weeks has left up to 200 people dead so far and ''washed away'' much progress toward dealing with its acute food crisis, the top-ranking U.N. humanitarian official said Friday.
A ship carrying 33 tons of U.N. relief supplies docked in Gonaives on Friday, the first significant aid delivery to tens of thousands of people who have gone with little food or clean water for four days.
Her third day without food or water, Fleurie Benita waded through the calf-high mud, balancing her life's possessions on her head, uncertain of what to do next, or what will come next.
Hurricane Ike was a serious concern in the Caribbean, where a run of storms already drenched islands, filled reservoirs and put low-lying areas at risk.
U.N. peacekeeping troops began handing out food and water to famished Haitians on Friday after the first shipload of aid sailed into a crumbling port on the outskirts of this flooded city, where tens of thousands are stranded in the wake of Tropical Storm Hanna.
The European Union is giving Haiti $2.85 million to help victims of Tropical Storm Hanna, which hit the Caribbean nation in the wake of two other major storms.
It took nearly five months, two failed nominations and a trail of drowned bodies in the wake of three deadly storms. And as two more hurricanes prepared to wreak havoc on a storm-ravaged Haiti, Haitian senators decided Friday to finally end the country's nearly 5-month-old political crisis they created by giving Prime Minister Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, the power to govern.
HURRICANE GUSTAV | THE AFTERMATH
Several South Florida organizations mobilized Thursday to ship money and supplies to the victims of Hurricane Gustav in Cuba, Haiti, and other Caribbean points.
Haiti's government says the death toll from Tropical Storm Hanna has more than doubled to 137, with most of the deaths coming in the flooded port city of Gonaives.
Tropical Storm Hanna was moving past the Bahamas on Thursday on its way to a possible landfall in North Carolina on Saturday, and Hurricane Ike became a bigger concern as it exploded into a massive Category 4 storm.
The convoy rumbled out of the U.N. base toward a flooded, starving and seething city Thursday, carrying some of the first food aid since Tropical Storm Hanna drowned Gonaives in muddy water three days ago.
Authorities in Haiti say the death toll from Tropical Storm Hanna has more than doubled to 61 in the impoverished Caribbean country.
Entering a flooded city on inflatable boats, U.N. peacekeepers found hundreds of hungry people stranded for two days on rooftops and upper floors Wednesday as the fetid carcasses of drowned farm animals bobbed in soupy floodwaters.
The poor Caribbean island of Dominica says it will receive $21 million from Venezuela under a leftist Latin American trade group initiative before the end of the week.
Tropical Storm Hanna knocked out power to the southern Bahamas on Wednesday and officials from Nassau to South Carolina warned residents to prepare for possible evacuations as it moves north and grows into a hurricane.
Families screamed for help from rooftops in parts of Haiti, where floods and mudslides from Tropical Storm Hanna has led to 26 deaths and deepened the country's desperate food shortage.
Far-reaching Tropical Storm Hanna drenched flood-plagued Haiti on Wednesday, adding to the miseries of a country that has lost 110 lives to mudslides and flooding since mid-August.
Jamaica's biggest banana company says it will be forced to temporarily halt all exports of the staple fruit after Gustav flattened entire plantations as it raked the island last week.
HURRICANE SEASON
Hanna, Ike and Josephine are lined up in the Atlantic like planes taxiing for takeoff. Will they land in South Florida? Maybe. The closest threat: Tropical Storm Hanna, a stalling, crawling system that battered parts of Haiti just as the country was trying to bail out from Hurricane Gustav's deadly wrath. Hanna will likely bring lousy weather to South Florida on Thursday and Friday as it skirts the coast toward a projected landfall in South Carolina.
