Some 1.5 million Haitians, still homeless after last January’s devastating earthquake, are facing the combined deadly threats of an approaching hurricane and a rapidly spreading cholera epidemic.
Tropical Storm Tomas was set to hit Haiti with torrential rains and high winds by Friday morning. The storm is expected to dump between 5 and 10 inches of rain on the battered Caribbean nation—15 inches in some spots—while unleashing a storm surge of up to nine feet.
They have also laid bare the sharp class tensions within what has long been the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, characterized by one of the starkest social divides between the masses of people and a small wealthy elite.
Haiti’s President Rene Preval went on national radio Thursday to issue a warning that only underscored the impotence of his government and the helplessness of the huge numbers of people left unprotected in the path of the storm.
“The government doesn’t have the means to evacuate everyone, Please take precautions. Follow all instructions … save your lives,” he said. “There is a storm. It is coming.”
The government has urged more than a million people still living in squalid tent camps to leave them for more secure structures. With the capital city of Port-au-Prince still devastated—more than 200,000 houses were damaged and barely 2 percent of the rubble has been cleared—this is hardly realistic. While the government claimed to have identified some 1,000 havens for evacuees, most of them are too far away from the tent cities and the teeming slum community of Cite Soleil, which at sea level is extremely vulnerable to the rising waters and torrential rain.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/hait-n05.shtml
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