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Hearts 4 Haiti
Bai Ling
Tyler Neitzel
Kelly Maroney & Brooke Lewis
Lorielle New
Pamela Shoop & Husband
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Health officials said Monday they are examining at least 120 suspected cases of cholera in Haiti’s capital, the most significant warning sign yet that the epidemic has spread from outlying areas to threaten as many as 3 million people.
Samples from patients in Port-au-Prince are being tested in a laboratory to confirm the presence of vibrio cholera bacteria, which has already killed at least 544 people in Haiti, Health Ministry Executive Director Gabriel Timothee told The Associated Press.
If confirmed, the bacteria could imperil an estimated 2.5 million to 3 million inhabitants, nearly half of whom have been living in tents or under tarps in easily flooded encampments since their houses were destroyed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
“We are working on the cases. … We don’t have confirmation yet,” Timothee said.
He said many of the hospitalized patients are believed to have recently arrived from parts of Haiti such as the Artibonite Valley, where the epidemic was first registered and has done its most ferocious damage. More than 6,400 of the known 8,138 cases to date have been in the agricultural region, clustered around the Artibonite River.
At least 114 of the people suspected of having the disease in the capital are in the Cite Soleil slum, the expansive oceanside shantytown at the capital’s far northeastern edge and its closest point to the valley.
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A Haitian woman at a camp in Leogane navigates floodwaters to gather her belongings. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / November 5, 2010)
Haiti is spared a direct hit at a time when more than a million people remain in tent camps after the Jan. 12 earthquake. But the hurricane offers a reminder of Haiti’s vulnerability.
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
November 6, 2010
Reporting from Leogane, Haiti
At 6 a.m. Friday, Roseanna Nicolas, 50, heard screams from the road. She looked out her door to see a sheet of tea-colored water streaming down the road.
Nicolas, her husband and four teenage children ran for higher ground as the water gurgled into their newly built home of sticks and dented tin.
The Rouyonne River had burst its banks and was now flowing right through the center of the town that was closest to the epicenter of a devastating January earthquake. Camps filled with refugees of one disaster were now inundated with 2 to 3 feet of water.
But by the afternoon, Nicolas was in good cheer, with a great toothy smile.
“God could have had it happen last night, and we wouldn’t have escaped,” she said. “Instead he had it happen during the day so we could see it and get out.”
Her original house had fallen to the ground with the rest of this old sugar plantation capital in the quake. The family of six barely escaped alive. They picked up what they could from the ruins and found a patch of open land under a mango tree behind an abandoned maternity hospital.
They started with tarps and sticks, and over 10 months built a little two-room house covered with salvaged tin. Now they were hunkered down inside the hospital, grateful to have escaped.
On Friday, Hurricane Tomas passed to the west, flooding several cities and causing much anxiety but sparing a direct hit at a time when more than a million people remain in tent camps after the Jan. 12 earthquake. By evening it was north of the Caribbean nation.
If anything, Tomas reminded the world how vulnerable Haiti remains.
“We say in Haiti, one bad thing brings a good thing,” said Michael Moscoso, a rum maker here. “Maybe if this didn’t happen, the international community wouldn’t realize what a mess Haiti still is.”
Haitian officials reported seven deaths. But government officials and foreign aid groups had been warning of a much greater catastrophe, particularly in Port-au-Prince, where most of the homeless live.
President Rene Preval took to the radio warning people in vulnerable areas to leave. “It’s not when the water comes upon you that you’re supposed to be looking for a place to stay,” he said. “Go to a friend’s house.”
But many didn’t have the option. In the months since the quake, international aid groups and the Haitian government have been unable to provide temporary shelters on a large scale.
By and large, camp residents hunkered down under tarps and pieces of rusted tin. “We don’t know what to do,” said Jubert Clerge, 48, watching the rain from his hut, made of leaky tarps hung over a stick frame, at a camp on the Delmas 33 road.
The stream just 10 feet away turns his floor into mud during every storm. Just two weeks ago, he was 3 feet deep in water and muck. Friday morning, he nailed a piece of corrugated tin across the bottom of his doorway, hung the clothes not destroyed by the last flood over the rafters and waited to see what God had in store for his country this time.
He looked at the piece of tin and laughed at the absurdity of it.
“I can’t do anything else,” he said.
This brand of fatalism is pervasive these days, as the promises of reconstruction, from the vantage of residents, fade every day.
With only moderate rains, the hillside camp of about 25,000 people was a sticky mess. Clay clung an inch thick to shoes. Trails were hard to tell from drainage ditches. Residents were worried that wind would rip their tarps away. Those who could tie them down did, but many could only hope that a couple of bricks and rocks might hold things in place.
Six young men sat in a circle singing hymns in one tent next to a muddy path. “When Jesus died at Calvary it was for me,” they sang. “I asked myself will I know, how many people I will owe.”
The six were cousins and brothers forced into the camp after their apartment fell during the earthquake.
Mores Fleurimond, 35 and the oldest, said he lost his job as a driver when the owner of his truck moved back to the provinces, and they had been surviving with the help of an uncle who sends them occasional bags of rice. The group has almost no belongings. Fleurimond, a muscular man with a thick goatee, was stuck wearing a secondhand T-shirt depicting a kitten and the quip, “Around here, cats are in charge.”
Despite the conditions, they have nowhere to go, as work is scarce and rent is sky high. “We’re staying until they force us out,” he said.
If their part of the hill gives way, their only option is to run to a “shelter” up the hill, which is just a bigger tent on secure ground. It would fit perhaps 100 people.
United Nations officials evacuated women and children from just one camp, Corail-Cesselesse, the only official camp near the capital set up by the government and relief organizations. Thursday afternoon, U.N. trucks took about 2,000 residents to a nearby hospital.
The same people had been moved in April from a camp in the hills above Port-au-Prince because that area was considered a hazard. But subsequent storms did more damage at Corail.
Waiting in a line of evacuees, Raphael James Lee, 24, said residents were only staying in the wind-blown camp, 10 miles outside the city, for the promise of houses to come.
In Leogane, rum maker Moscoso said he hoped that fears sparked by Tomas would give a boost to the rebuilding effort.
He said a malaise had set in as promises of reconstruction and jobs never materialized.
But Friday, people of the town were out and about, chatting and laughing as some forded the river.
A little boy smiled and poled an old ice chest around a newfound pond next to the highway.
“In some ways, we have so little to do,” Moscoso said, “that a disaster brings some sort of activity or occupation.”
October 24,2010
The earthquake that left Haiti in ruins and killed more than 200,000 people may not have had been the “big one’’ and almost certainly wasn’t the last one.
New studies published Sunday point to a previously unmapped “blind’’ fault as the likely trigger for the catastrophe nine months ago and found no evidence it had eased more than two centuries of increasing seismic strain along the island’s major pressure point, which geologists call the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone.
If anything, the studies conclude, Haiti now faces a heightened risk of repeat quakes along the Enriquillo fault — particularly near the heavily damaged, densely populated capital of Port-au-Prince.
“Even if this earthquake did not occur along the entire fault, it’s certainly an indication that stress has built up in the area,’’ said Andrew Freed, a Purdue University geophysicist and co-author of one of several papers published online in Nature Geoscience. “It’s locked and loaded. My concern is that we are in the beginning of new cycles of earthquakes.’’
What scientists stress they can’t pinpoint with any certainity is when or how frequently temblors might again shake the devastated country. Before the Jan. 12 quake, which measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, Haiti was last rocked by significant earthquakes in 1751 and 1770. But University of Miami earthquake expert Timothy Dixon, who co-authored another study in the journal, said the series of quakes in similar “strike-slip’’ fault zones in places like Sumatra and Turkey strongly suggest it won’t take centuries for the next big quake. Typically, he said, other large quakes follow within decades and at either end of the fault zone, where earlier quakes can increase tensions between massive, slow-moving tectonic plates. The sudden, violent shifts that finally relieve that strain are what generate the intense shaking of an earthquake.
“There is another shoe waiting to drop at one or both ends of the rupture zone,’’ said Dixon, a professor of geophysics at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “`We can’t say very much about when that other shoe will drop. It could be 100 years from now or it could be next month.’’
The studies, published in a special edition of Nature Geoscience focused on the Jan. 12 quake, are among the first peer-reviewed research on the quake’s origins. The findings echo concerns many geologists had raised before and after the quake. They also underline the difficult rebuilding challenges that face Haiti, where aging, weakly re-enforced and poorly constructed buildings multipled the death toll and left 1.5 million people homeless and living in tents.
Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, sits atop two major faults — borders between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates, which grind against each other as they move about one inch per year. The 200-plus years of pent-up strain in the Enriquillo fault, which runs from Jamaica east through southern Haiti and the capital city into the Dominican Republic’s Enriquillo Valley, has long been considered a trouble zone.
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