At least 30 dead in Haiti from Hurricane Melissa

The death toll from Hurricane Melissa in Haiti continued to climb Thursday, with authorities saying that at least 30 people are now dead and 20 others are missing.

The biggest toll occurred in the country’s gang-ridden West region, when a swollen Digue River overflowed its banks and caused widespread flooding in the coastal town of Petit-Goâve, southwest of the capital. At least 23 people died, including 10 children, Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection said in the disaster.

“The search for victims is still under way,” the disaster office said in its latest report. “The Grise River is also swollen and has swept away a house in Tabarre.”

The hurricane, which made landfall on Tuesday in Jamaica as a Category 5 storm, didn’t make a direct hit on Haiti. But as it battered the southwestern coast of Jamaica, Melissa winds and rains lashed the southern coast of Haiti, causing deadly floods that washed out roads, submerged cars, wiped out crops and buried homes under landslides.

The head of the United Nations Office for Migration, speaking to reporters in New York on Thursday, said aid agencies still do not yet have a full view of the storm’s devastation after Haitians were forced to endure more than a week of rainfall.

“We need to do the assessments to really understand the extent of the damage and the human toll,” Gregoire Goodstein, the head of mission for office, said.

Those assessments require traveling on a World Food Program helicopter to the affected regions due to gangs’ control of key roads. “Because of the weather we’ve had to interrupt a lot of the flights,” Goodstein said.

But the report from Haiti’s disaster office is starting to give some idea of not just the damages, but also how the deaths and the devastation occurred.

In the town of Dame-Marie in the Grand’Anse, a man was injured when a tree fell as he rode his motorcycle. “His passenger is missing,” the report said.

In the Artibonite region one person died, and 250 people were displaced in the town of Saint-Marc, where residents have been fighting against a take-over by armed gangs.

Several cities were under water, particularly the town of Corail, where the downtown area was flooded. There was also coastal flooding in Anse-d’Hainault and the offshore Cayemites Islands.

The roofs of schools were blown off and at least 659 homes in the region of the Nippes were flooded.

Melissa caused significant damage to roads, particularly in the southeast region of the country. The Gosseline River washed away part of a major road that links the town of Jacmel with the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Blockages were also eeported by local authorities in the towns of Belle-Anse and Marigot in the southeast. Rivers flooded in the regions of the Grand’Anse.

The impact in Haiti is complicated by its ongoing humanitarian crisis, which Goodstein said is creating “immense suffering.”

“We have 1.4 million people that are displaced because of gang violence,” he said. “So all of this is coming on top of the very critical situation that we’re facing now.”

In addition to the roads, farms in the south have also sustained damage due to flooding.

That will likely worsen the country’s already dire food crisis. There are currently 5.7 million people, about half the country’s population, who are going hungry every day, Goodstein said. There have also been cases of cholera

“So we’re also having a public health emergency on top of all the existing vulnerabilities,” he added, stressing that the U.N.’s ongoing humanitarian response plan remains “grossly underfunded.”

“This is really putting at risk.. our ability to continue with life-saving operations, whether it’s linked to hurricanes or to the existing crisis linked to gang violence,” Goodstein said.

“What we need right now is the funding,” he said. “We have the teams on the ground, we have the coordination structures with the government, but we don’t have the resources.”