Here are the latest comments from our readers. regarding Hurricane Hanna, October, 2008 - At least 331killed in Haiti
Read read then all and submit your own comments Friday Sep 12, 2008Getting supplies to flooded areas of Haiti that need it most has been the biggest challenge for volunteers in the weeks after the region was battered by three devastating storms.
Friday Sep 12, 2008GONAIVES, Haiti -- 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 killed 137 Haitians and drowned Gonaives in muddy water three days ago. Hungry children at three orphanages were waiting for the canvas-topped trucks, loaded with warm pots of rice and beans and towing giant tanks of drinking water. The trucks didn't make it.
The convoy crept over mud-caked, semi-paved roads past closed stores, overturned buses and women wading in water up to their knees with plastic tubs on their heads. After about 45 minutes, the half-dozen trucks ground to a halt. U.N. peacekeepers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests jumped out while others stood guard with assault rifles. Before them, a huge gouge marred the road. The floods had split the asphalt, and water ran through the 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) gap. The convoy turned around. And the children _ like tens of thousands more in this increasingly desperate city _ went another day without food. Later, Argentine U.N. troops stopped to dish out cooked rice from their own food supplies to a small crowd of hungry orphans. "I haven't eaten since Monday," 12-year-old Srita Omiscar said as she waited in line with about 50 others.
Friday Sep 12, 2008Gonaives _ a collection of concrete buildings, run-down shacks and plazas with dilapidated fountains _ lies in a flat river plain between the ocean and deforested mountains that run with mud even in light rains. Hanna swirled over Haiti for four days, dumping vast amounts of water, blowing down fruit trees and ruining stores of food as it swamped tin-roofed houses. Hanna finally moved north Thursday with near hurricane-force winds on a path toward the southeastern U.S. coast. But in the chaos there was no way to know how many people might be dead, or how many had been driven from their homes. Two other storms killed 85 people in August, and forecasters warned that fearsome Hurricane Ike could hit Haiti next week. Haiti's government has few resources to help. Rescue convoys have been blocked by floodwaters, although the U.N. World Food Program said Thursday it was sending a food-laden boat to Gonaives from the capital, Port-au-Prince, and would set up a base in the stricken city. "All roads able to access Gonaives are cut either by bridges that have collapsed, by trees that have fallen down, or by waters that have washed away parts of the streets," U.N. food agency representative Myrta Kaulard said.
Friday Sep 12, 2008Anger and frustration were growing at the inability or unwillingness of the government and the international community to help.
"If they don't have food, it can be dangerous," warned Sen. Youri Latortue, who flew in by helicopter. "They can't wait." Dozens of people gathered around the gates of the U.N. base. Some children climbed cinderblock walls topped by barbed wire to ask soldiers inside for food. Edgy U.N. peacekeepers went on a heightened state of alert, and have traded their floppy hats for helmets. Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the U.N. Development Program who just returned from Haiti, admonished international donors to do more.
"The poverty in the rain and mud of Haiti that I witnessed is nothing less than a disgrace," he said. "Many actors or potential actors try to play their part, ranging from the national government to multilateral and bilateral donors and NGOS. They all need to do more and better." The few aid-group representatives in Gonaives did what they could _ but knew it wasn't enough.
Friday Sep 12, 2008With Haiti's major bridges crumbled, roadways flooded and an estimated one million people homeless, humanitarian and government groups struggled Monday to push relief supplies into the country and throughout the storm-ravaged Caribbean. Four storms in rapid succession have demolished patches of the Caribbean from Cuba to Hispaniola to Jamaica to the Turks and Caicos Islands to the Bahamas, killing more than 350 people, sinking entire towns and hampering aid efforts. ''We need a flood of helicopters because there is a lot of food coming into Port-au-Prince and it cannot reach the provinces,'' Haitian President Rene Preval said in an interview with The Miami Herald. In Haiti, rescue groups have no access to many interior villages across the southern region and to hard-hit Gonaives, north of the capital, which was cut off when a bridge collapsed. A Red Cross truck trying to reach Les Cayes on the southern coast had to turn back because of impassable roads.
Friday Sep 12, 2008The U.S. military helped deliver food and medical help Monday, and the U.S. Agency for International Development donated $10 million. Money also trickled in from around the world:
The European Union gave $2.85 million for relief efforts, and the Dominican Republic -- also struck by some of this year's storms -- donated water, food and mattresses. Trinidad and Tobago sent Haiti about $1.5 million. Two U.S. Navy MH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters flew tens of thousands of pounds of food to Jeremie, an isolated Haitian city that Hurricane Gustav pounded. And the USS Kearsarge, a Navy hospital ship equipped with four operating rooms and 53 beds, arrived in Port-au-Prince after being rerouted from a mission to Colombia. ''It gives us a purpose,'' said Sugat Patel, 34, an infectious-disease physician aboard the Kearsarge. He had five days off ahead of him until the ship was sent to Haiti. ``I believe every soldier here would rather be doing something like this. They are doing their job.'' In South Florida, meanwhile, politicians, charities and Caribbean-American coalitions called on people to send cash and supplies to the region. ''Despite our economic downturn in Florida, we must make a generous sacrifice,'' Miami Archbishop John C. Favalora said. Favalora assured that the money would be delivered directly to churches in Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Jamaica and other affected countries. He then waded into the contentious political debate surrounding U.S. policy toward Cuba and Haiti, calling for an immediate granting of temporary protected status for Haitians. That status would stop deportations of Haitians, which Favalora said would be unspeakably cruel given the current conditions on the island. South Florida congressional representatives also urged President Bush to halt the deportation of illegal Haitian immigrants until the island recovers from Ike's devastation. And a coalition of Cuban-American groups asked the Bush administration to temporarily lift the sanctions on family aid and remittances, as did Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Friday Sep 12, 2008With frequent flooding, hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands lacking food and basic provisions, Haiti has been hit badly so far this hurricane season, with four severe storms in less than four weeks. Haiti has suffered in part because of severe deforestation and extreme poverty. After Tropical Storm Fay and Hurricane Gustav in August, Haiti was devastated by Tropical Storm Hanna last week, and flooding on Saturday night and Sunday when Hurricane Ike clipped the country's northern peninsula as it raged westward toward Cuba.
Damaged infrastructure and continuing rains left aid organizations struggling to bring emergency assistance to hundreds of thousands of storm victims. About 600 people died in Haiti's recent storms, according to UN and government figures, and one million were affected. The storms also battered roads and bridges. But many say the damage could have been reduced by better environmental planning. "There's a real emergency. Measures should be taken to take to slow down the degradation of the environment in Haiti,"
The use of charcoal in most cooking in Haiti -- where some 70 percent live on less than two dollars per day -- has contributed to massive deforestation. Wood is systematically cut for use as charcoal, in baking and for laundry, contributing to Haiti's environmental destruction. Haiti's plant cover is estimated at less than two percent and recent heavy downpours led to severe flooding much worse than in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. The Government need to make changes now or it will get worst
Friday Sep 12, 2008Hurricane Hanna and Ike affected Haiti and many people die, houses are flooded. It is just the usual. It has been happening so far and it will continue to happen as far in the future as I can see. Why is the devastation worst in Haiti after a Hurricane. Only 4 people died in Cuba as a result of a major Hurricane. On the other side, when there is a tropical storm in Haiti. Many people are killed. Why can't we organize ourselves like any other nations. Are we just incapable of governing ourselves?. What do we demand from our government?
Friday Sep 12, 2008Whether human activity should share any blame for the problem Haiti is currently facing with Hurrican Hannah and Ike remains uncertain. What is not in doubt is that such activity has contributed significantly to the resulting devastation. To describe the widespread destruction left last week by tropical storm Jeanne as it swept through Haiti as an accident waiting to happen would trivialise the latest human tragedy to hit the island. But as bodies continue to be recovered from mud and debris left behind by the flooding — more than 1, 000 are already known to have died, and the final figure is likely to be much higher — many legitimate questions are being asked about what more can be done to limit the impact of such events in the future, and what science can contribute. Whatever conflicting views may exist in the scientific community about the origins of the hurricanes that have been sweeping the region this year with a ferocity unknown for several decades, there is widespread belief that such events are likely to increase in the years ahead. Indeed a report published earlier this year by researchers at the United Nations University predicted that, unless preventative steps are taken, there will be a doubling of the number of people living in the path of devastating floods over the next 50 years (See Threat of devastating floods 'will double' by 2050). As a result, addressing both the origins and consequences of weather-related disasters must remain high on the global research agenda in the years ahead. Awareness of this need already exists within the scientific and technological communities. It is clear, for example, that the impact of the recent storms would have been very much greater without the accurate forecasting techniques — the outcome of decades of research — that allowed many millions to escape their worst effects. The challenge is to find new ways of channelling scientific expertise into prevention strategies that still receive only a small proportion of the resources usually required to cover the resulting damage, not to mention the cost of the loss of human life. Impact of deforestation
Deforestation and climate change were two of the factors identified in the UNU report (a third being population growth). The role of the first of these in Haiti is already evident. A country which, even half a century ago, was covered by large areas of forest has seen most of this disappear as wood during the intervening period, to the extent that trees now cover less than 1.5 per cent of the total land area.
As a result, the water that fell on the island during last week's storms rapidly washed away much of the remaining soil and clogged the rivers with debris, destroying houses and communities in their wake.
As experts point out, deforestation is a complex process that has different origins in different parts of the world. In much of Latin America, for example, a major cause is the clearance of land for soyabean production, particularly to meet the growing demands for animal food in Europe and, especially, China. In Haiti, the driving force seems to have been poverty, which has forced people to rely on wood as a source not only of fuel — there is no electricity outside the major towns on the island — but also, through its sale as charcoal, of a meagre income. The social cost of such practices was already made vividly clear by another heavy storm that hit both Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic earlier this year (See Reforestation could prevent future floods in Haiti). In the latter, where much of the forests remain intact, the death toll was relatively minimal. In Haiti, in contrast, deforestation was largely blamed for the deaths of more than 3, 000 in widespread flooding from which the country was only just beginning to recover when last week's events knocked it back on to its knees.
Technology may be able to reduce the pressure on trees, at least in the short and medium term. Scientists working for a group known as the Haitian Environmental Foundation, for example, are currently investigating alternatives to wood for cooking stoves, and have developed briquettes made out of compressed recycled paper that burn more efficiently and cleanly than charcoal. The foundation is also subsidising the conversion of ovens used in bakeries — among the largest consumers of wood in Haiti — to run on propane, while the US Agency for International Development has been replacing about 50, 000 wood stoves a year with oil-fired burners. But even those involved in such projects (and as well as complementary replanting programmes) admit that they can only scratch the surface of problems that have much deeper roots. And that technical fixes, however much they remove pressures on scarce resources, will only make an impact in the long-run if they can be integrated into sustainable development strategies that allow individuals to rise from the poverty that is itself the cause of so many unsustainable social practices around the world. The need for a strategic approach
A piecemeal approach to weather modification is even less likely to have a significant impact. There has been no shortage of ingenious technical proposals. The most widely tested have been efforts to 'seed' rain clouds with silver iodide to accelerate the life cycle of cyclones by encouraging water to condense inside them. Pioneered in the United States, and now being considered in countries like China, such cloud-seeding techniques still hold some promise, even if initial experiments have been disappointing. But whether they would have any significant impact on the types of storms currently being encountered in the Caribbean remains highly uncertain. The same is true of other, more ingenious, ideas. One that has been receiving some attention in Mexico and elsewhere has been to investigate ways of preventing the evaporation of ocean water in region where cyclones form. And in the 1970s, an alternative suggestion – so far untested – was to spread clouds of ash particles around the edges of the cyclone to generate heat by absorbing solar radiation, and thus reduce the power of the storm. What is already clear, however, is that, as with deforestation, individual technical fixes, even if they eventually prove to have some effect, also have their limits. What is required is a strategic approach that places the efforts of individual teams of researchers within a wider context that seeks to address some of the underlying causes of problems. Which is where the question of climate change — and attempts to limit the phenomenon and to mitigate its consequences — comes in.
As with the extensive flooding caused in Bangladesh earlier this year (see Bangladesh floods: rich nations 'must share the blame'), there is no clear evidence that climate change can be identified as the main cause of the recent hurricanes and tropical storms in the Caribbean. Certainly, as residents of the region know only too well, there have been many similar, and frequently more devastating, events in the past.
And the most recent ones could well be primarily due to natural geochemical cycles, including the warming of parts of the world's oceans. But it would be equally shortsighted to deny that global warming could be involved in some way. As many have pointed out, the warming of the oceans (together with the subsequent rise in sea-level across the globe) is one of the most widely predicted components of global warming. And that itself means that, although curbing such warming is unlikely to reduce significantly the incidence of tropical storms, refusing to take major steps in this direction is likely to help increase both their frequency and severity. In the past, hurricanes and cyclones were frequently referred to as 'acts of God', for which explanations were sought in human transgression, and avoidance through prayer and good behaviour. More recently, the tendency has been to label them as 'natural disasters', with the implication of inevitability, and the possibilities of human intervention limited to prediction and protection. Both remain important priorities. And modern science can contribute substantially to each.
The challenge now is to move beyond a primarily reactive mode to such disasters by recognising that they are increasingly due to a combination of natural and human causes — and that responses need to be moulded accordingly. One, for example, might be the creation of a new Global Disaster Management Agency. Others lie in ensuring that definitions of sustainable development include fully developed risk management strategies. There are no easy solutions. But it remains essential that we continue to look for them, at the scientific, technological and political levels. Source: In part by David Dickson
Friday Sep 12, 2008Haitians has to coop with Hurricane Hanna and Ike. not only they will coop, they will also survive and forget. Noone is responsible,
All Haitians have endured so much over their lifetimes: extreme poverty, political turmoil, gang violence. They are accustomed to disaster. But this natural catastrophe, death too from hurricane Hannah and Ike, may well have been made worse by man.
What is most noticeable about the range is that it is almost devoid of trees. Haitians cook using charcoal and have felled almost all of the timber, thus exposing themselves to landslides in heavy rain. The fresh thick gouges in the hillsides, the topsoil gave way and millions of gallons of mud and water poured into the valley below. One question is beginning to be asked: What should happen to Gonaive when the waters finally recede?
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