In devastated Haiti, a struggle just to survive

Many lack food, water and habitable homes, and aid is scarce. The death toll is at 1,071, with another 1,250 listed as missing.

GONAIVES, Haiti - When Tropical Storm Jeanne sent its floodwaters raging through this coastal city of 250,000 people Saturday evening, those residents who could took to the roofs.

Four days later, thousands are still there.

As they struggle to survive, many without food or water, it's by no means clear how soon they will able to come back down. And when they do, thousands will have no habitable homes to go back to.

They, of course, are the lucky ones. By Wednesday night the official death toll in Haiti from Jeanne stood at 1,071 - mostly in Gonaives - with another 1,250 listed as missing.

While the deepest floodwaters, which reached 10 feet in some parts of the city, are receding, what is left behind is a catastrophe on a scale unheard of even in this disaster-stricken country.

At least half of the city remains under 2 feet of water, the streets filled with storm debris, the bloated and discolored carcasses of cows, goats and sheep, and a deep layer of thick, liquified mud coating everything.

"We've been living up here since Saturday," said Alex Dumerville, 45, atop the roof of a store in one of the worst hit neighborhoods near the city center. "We've hardly any food or water - we've got nothing, it's all gone," he added, waving at his family's few salvaged belongings - mostly bedding, clothes and mattresses.

Dumerville climbed onto the roof of a neighbor's hardware store with his family and son when the floodwaters rose up to their chests early Saturday evening. They were soon joined by seven other families. Doing a quick head count, he calculated that there were 80 people now living on the roof.

All around it was the same scene, roofs littered with whatever people could rescue from their homes, including the odd piece of furniture. One man on a nearby roof stood holding a naked child in his arms under a beach umbrella.

Elsewhere women hung clothes out to dry on makeshift washing lines. Some residents used sheets tied to poles to provide shade for the children from the harsh sun.

Aid began to arrive Wednesday, but oh so slowly. What emergency food and water supplies that did reach the city were quickly exhausted at the handful of distribution points set up by relief agencies.

United Nations troops with riot shields stood guard as residents standing in long lines realized that there wasn't enough for everyone.

At one distribution point where some 1,500 people were lined up troops fired shots in the air after fighting broke out. U.N. officials hired local gang leaders to help enforce discipline. But many seeking aid went away empty-handed.

"If they don't get more food in here quickly there's going to be major disorder," said Dumerville, who didn't bother to join the queue. What was he supposed to do with the rice and sunflower oil being handed out, he asked. "We don't have anything to cook it with."

Instead, he sent one young man out to fetch water from a well on higher ground. Dinner on Wednesday was going to consist of uncooked plantains - the same as the previous two nights.

A host of relief agencies were busy in the city arranging for the distribution of larger shipments of aid due to arrive. Meanwhile, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched a worldwide appeal Wednesday for $3.3-million to fund relief operations to 40,000 Haitian victims, and several nations were sending aid.

One student leader from Port-au-Prince, Herve St. Hilius, took matters into his own hands, organizing a truckload of donated rolls of bread and small plastic bags of purified water from the nearby town of St. Marc.

Volunteers handed the bread out to people running along beside the truck, while others threw the water bags to people on rooftops.

"The prime minister is appealing to the whole country for help so we came here to lend a hand," said St. Hilius, riding shotgun on the front fender.

At a makeshift, open-air medical clinic on the floor of a university construction site, Argentine military doctors tended to a steady stream of injured flood victims. Most had cuts to the feet, from wading barefoot through the muddy flood water.

One 14-year-old boy on a stretcher rested his head on the floor as a doctor stitched up a gaping gash in the front of his neck. A nurse held up the boy's T-shirt to stop the breeze blowing dust in the wound. The boy was carrying a bucket of water on his head when he walked into a sharp piece of wood.

Karoline Aldjuste, 21, cradled her sick 19-month-old niece in her arms as she waited for medical attention.

"She almost drowned as I was trying to get out of the house," she said, her hair and face streaked with dried mud. "We were swept down the street by the water and I almost lost her."

The listless little girl was suffering from diarrhea, she said, and hadn't eaten in two days. Aldjuste climbed down a rope from the roof of her house to come to the clinic Wednesday.

Many streets of the city were still passable only in trucks and large SUVs. Overturned vehicles were strewn by the side of the roads, wrapped around lamp posts or crushed against the sides of partially collapsed houses. The roof of one car was barely visible under the brown water.

In some homes people shoveled mud out of their front doors into the streets even while standing with water half up to their knees. Lines on the walls of homes marked where the flood water had receded from above the ground floor windows. Thick piles of debris from trees and garbage blocked the metal security grills on some windows.

Many residents waded through the streets in search of food, or simply trying to get their lives back together. One man dragged a suitcase on wheels through a foot of water in a seemingly fruitless salvage effort.

The stench of rotting animals was often overpowering. All along the road dead animals lay in the water, tongues hanging out of their mouths. Even so, only 20 feet from a headless sheep a woman sat in the middle of the flowing brown water washing clothes as though it was a normal day.

On a tour in the back of a U.N. truck, Argentine Army Capt. Hernan Nantillo described how the flood waters began to rise Saturday afternoon after two days of rain.

"At first we were walking on patrol in the streets with water up to our knees. Then the water started rising very fast. In 15 minutes it was up to our chests," he said. "Suddenly the street became a river."

Nantillo described how troops spent Sunday picking up hundreds of dead bodies all over the city. "I've never seen anything like it. It was a scene from hell," he said.

Horrifying as it is, the devastation wrought by Jeanne is also an all-too-familiar story in Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest and most environmentally ravaged nation.

While the causes of the disaster are not precisely known, it comes only four months after another storm killed more than 1,000 in southeastern Haiti.

Both natural disasters appear to have a human element, resulting from the deforestation of Haiti's mountainous hinterland. With electrical power scarce or nonexistent in most rural areas, peasants must cut down trees for charcoal to cook. That has left enormous areas denuded of any vegetation and highly vulnerable to flash floods.

In the case of Gonaives, heavy rain appears to have caused three small, often dried-up riverbeds to burst their banks, sending a cascade of water on the city.

Ironically, the principal river, La Quinte, gets its name from the French word to cough, because it normally spits out so little water. Added to that, the city has only three hopelessly inadequate drainage canals, all blocked with debris.

As the U.N. truck moved slowly through the flood waters along Route 1, the main road that cuts through the middle of the city, Nantillo said it could days before the waters recede completely.

He didn't expect to find any more human corpses. Mass graves were being prepared for burial even though most of the dead have not been identified.

"Our next task will be to collect the dead animals," he said, grimacing.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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