Before Sandy hit the East Coast

haiti-sandy.jpgAn elderly woman weeps outside her dwelling in a tent city following Hurricane Sandy, October 30, 2012 in the Canape-vert suburb of Port-au-Prince. (Getty Images)

I’m not going to pretend that superstorm Sandy’s impact on the U.S. is not a huge story. Clearly, it is.

But I had to do a little more digging to find updates on Haiti, the Caribbean nation Sandy hit hardest. It’s faced with yet another devastating disaster. From the NYT:

Even though the storm’s center skirted the country, more than 20 inches of rain fell on Haiti’s south and southwest over four days last week, causing at least 52 deaths, tearing out crops and destroying houses.

“We are facing a major crisis,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said this weekend after he flew over the regions that had been hit by the storm.

The government said that the homes of as many as 200,000 people had been damaged — on top of almost 400,000 people still homeless from the January 2010 earthquake. “We have a lot of work ahead of us in terms of the aid that we will need to deliver in the days, weeks and months to come,” Mr. Lamothe said. “It won’t be easy because there are many roads and bridges that have been cut off.”

In the tent camps set up after the 2010 earthquake, Haitians described their lives as “misery.”

The country’s leaders and the United Nations are planning an appeal for donations, the Guardian reports.

Comments are closed.