Tropical Storm Laura battered Haiti on Sunday, August 23, flooding the streets of capital Port-au-Prince and cutting off roads across the country. Photo credit: Dieu Nalio Chery, Associated Press.
PORT-AU-PRINCE/SANTO DOMINGO--At least nine people died in Haiti and two were missing on Sunday, when heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Laura buried large swaths of the country under murky floodwaters and threatened to overpower the country’s only hydroelectric dam.
Laura was headed for a possible hit later in the week on the Louisiana coast as a hurricane, along with Hurricane Marco. But first, it was expected to make landfall Sunday evening somewhere between the Cuban provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Granma.
”The waves are already spilling over the Gibara seawall. Many residents have already left the area for fear of flooding,” Guillermina Montejo, a resident of the coastal Cuban city of Holguín, told el Nuevo Herald.
The centre of Tropical Storm Laura passed into Haiti Sunday morning after moving from Puerto Rico and through the Dominican Republic (DR), where it also left at least four dead and a destructive trail of floods, heavy rains and wind in its wake.
Among the dead: two children
In Haiti, a 10-year-old girl in the south-eastern town of Anse-à-Pitre near the Haiti-DR border was killed when a tree fell on her house. In the neighbouring DR, a seven-year-old died, along with a 44-year-old woman, when their house collapsed in Santo Domingo, the capital, which saw severe flooding and damaged homes.
Video posted on Twitter showed DR Civil Defence workers pulling trapped residents out of the rubble in at least one area of Santo Domingo known as Palmarejo.
“We want to show solidarity with the pain of these families; we ask God to bring them comfort and we ... will be there to help them with their needs,” Juan Manuel Méndez García, the director of the Center of Emergency Operations, said in a press conference.
Visiting one of the hard-hit neighbourhoods, La Yuca, newly sworn-in DR President Luis Abinadar promised the crowd he would implement a plan to prevent tragedy around the ravines and rivers in urban areas that are particularly vulnerable to dangerous floods during storms.
“We have an integral plan, and it will take us various years,” Abinader said, later telling one woman who had lost her home, “We will relocate you to somewhere safe and help you with everything. The government is here for you.”
First Lady Raquel Arbaje visited the funeral of Clarissa and Darwin Frias, who died during the storm when their home collapsed. “You are not alone, we have to make sure no life is lost,” she said.
Laura left more than one million Dominicanos without power, according to the country’s electric utility company, and large parts of the Dominican Republic without water.
Méndez said the storm forced the evacuation of more than 1,050 Dominicanos, damaged roads, knocked down trees and downed power lines while leaving large swaths of the country’s 11 million residents without services. He said damage was concentrated in the northern and eastern regions of the country.
While he did not say how many homes had been destroyed, Méndez pointed out that many houses were under the threat of being destroyed “because of what has happened to the rivers.”
In Haiti, Laura’s destruction was equally severe. Officials spent the better half of an afternoon press conference Sunday pleading with Haitians to not cross rivers, and to protect themselves. And while they pleaded with Haitians to stay put in some communities, they also begged for some in others “to hurry and flee.”
An overflowing Péligre Dam in Haiti’s Central Plateau meant that authorities had to quickly release its waters, endangering the rice plains and farms in the nearby Artibonite Valley. ~ The Miami Herald ~
