Storms Turn Haiti's Roads Into Rivers

Holly Inurreta—Catholic Relief Services' regional technical advisor for emergencies—is on the ground in Haiti. She spoke via phone today with CRS Communications Officer Sara Fajardo. Here's the story that developed from that conversation:

On Saturday morning, we took two trucks to Gonaives when the road was open. The trucks carried enough food for 240 families for 15 days, and enough water for 800 families for 3 days. We also brought 2,000 hygiene kits.

A half-hour outside of Gonaives, we saw a lake, a massive part of an open savannah that was filled with water. It's normally dry, but the rain had inundated it and washed out the main bridge to the city. Gonaives is a floodplain, one of the biggest watersheds in Haiti. Severe deforestation means the water just runs down the river and creates massive flooding. There is no way for this devastated land to absorb this water. We had to find an alternative route, often driving in areas that were knee-high with water.

Flooding from four recent storms turned roads in the coastal Haitian city of Gonaives into brackish rivers. Photo by Alix Innocent/CRS

When we got to the city, it was clear that the water had gone up as high as 10 feet. You could see grass and debris stuck above entryways of houses, trucks flipped over. Since it was drying out, we saw people trying to restart their lives. They were laying out papers and clothes. Think of your images of people after Katrina: You have people sitting on roofs just waiting for the water to go down. There were people crawling on top of vehicles trying to get to the second floor—others were selling food, sugarcane, water, anything. They were trying to start up markets, but I don't know how many were buying. Women were laundering their clothes in the dirty water. Where there was no water, there was 3 to 6 inches of mud.

There are so many people affected. It's hard in an urban setting, it can get really chaotic with the huge masses of people. Security becomes an issue. We're planning small distributions with our local partner Caritas Gonaives. Because it was threatening to rain again, our partners insisted that we leave immediately after dropping off our supplies. They didn't want to get us stuck in Gonaives once more rain fell. In Port-au-Prince we can get more accomplished, we are strategically placed to coordinate the relief effort throughout Haiti. If we'd stayed it might have been days before we could leave again.

That night Ike brought more rain. It rained so hard on Saturday and Sunday that the water once again reached 10 feet high. The people had two days' reprieve and are now back in the same situation. The city is rivers, and people don't have boats. Our local partners will get out as soon as possible, and as soon as the water gets down to a movable level, they'll be out distributing. Our food is in a safe, dry warehouse.

While Gonaives has been very much affected, there are also hundreds of thousands of people affected by the series of storms that have hit the country this past month. The rains aren't over; this is September, and Haiti will expect to get more rain in October and November. In the United States it's the hurricanes with their high-moving winds that pose the most danger. People think that hurricanes are what does the most damage in other parts of the world. In places like flood-prone Haiti with its mountainous terrain and deforestation, it's not the size of the storm, it's how long it stays and how much rainfall it brings that dictates the severity of a storm's devastation. We're very impressed by the huge hurricane, but the slow-moving storm does the most damage.

Sara Fajardo is a CRS communications officer for Latin America and the Caribbean. She is based in Baltimore, Maryland.