At least four dead as Hurricane Tomas hits Haiti

By Joe Mozingo

Saturday, November 6, 2010; 1:01 AM
PORT-AU-PRINCE, 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 patchwork home.
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 two to three 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 fell 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 dented squares of 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 1 million people remain in tent camps after the Jan. 12 earthquake. By evening it was north of the island nation.
If anything, Tomas reminded the world how vulnerable Haiti remains.
Haitian radio reported four 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.
- Los Angeles Times
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/06/AR2010110608345.html