Hurricane Matthew’s Devastating Toll in Haiti

Haitians attempt to cross the river La Digue in PetitGove southwest of PortauPrince where the rains of Hurricane Matthew...
Haitians attempt to cross the river La Digue, in Petit-Goâve, southwest of Port-au-Prince, where the rains of Hurricane Matthew caused a bridge to collapse on Wednesday.PHOTOGRAPH BY HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP / GETTY

It is hard to describe to people who have never experienced a major hurricane what it’s like to go through one. The pounding torrential rains. The roaring gale-force winds, which can uproot and toss massive trees as though they were twigs. The relentlessness of it all as it carries on for hours, slowly increasing your doubts about your creaking house’s ability to remain standing. It is as if the air you are accustomed to breathing has suddenly gathered supernatural force and become angry, and decided to try to kill you.

Of course, the less stable your house, the more terror you feel. I remember my parents describing their fright as they trembled inside their respective homes—my mother’s a wooden tin-covered house, my father’s a concrete one—while Hurricane Flora, a Category 4 storm, roared through Haiti, on October 2, 1963. Ask any Haitian who was there and is old enough to remember and you might still be able to detect a remnant of alarm. Flora, which also struck Cuba and the Bahamas, was responsible for thousands of deaths in Haiti.

I only remember two hurricanes from the time I lived in Haiti as a child. Hurricane David made landfall in the northern part of the country, in late August, 1979, as a Category 3 storm. It took a high death toll in the neighboring Dominican Republic, where it struck as a Category 5. No deaths were officially attributed to David in Haiti, though my family members were sure there were many that went unnoted—deaths in remote rural regions of the country are rarely reported to or recorded by authorities unless they occur in large numbers. The following year, in August of 1980, Hurricane Allen brushed past Haiti’s southern coast. It did not make landfall but still took several hundred lives.

At the time, I was living in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, whose surrounding mountain ranges tend to offer some buffer or act as a partial shield against hurricane-force winds, even if they don’t offer much protection against the rain. Flooding would continue even after the rain had stopped. Waves of muddy water would snake through the alleys between houses. Our city streets would quickly become rivers, rivers that seemed as though they could easily carry people away.

The first hurricanes I experienced in the United States made landfall in Florida during the brutal 2005 season, which brought three Category 5 storms, most famously the catastrophic Katrina, in August. My eldest daughter was five months old when Katrina struck New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I held her tightly in my arms as I spent hours watching on television as the bodies of men, women, and children floated down the flooded streets of New Orleans. In addition to sorrow and horror, I felt a kinship with the survivors of the hurricane, who, like my family and me, had been born and raised in the paths of such storms and were now living in their crosshairs.

Haiti has just found itself in the crosshairs of yet another powerful storm, Hurricane Matthew. A Category 4 storm with hundred-and-forty-five-mile-per-hour winds, Matthew made landfall in the southwest region of the country this week, decimating large portions and creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Though it is still too early to gauge the full magnitude of the damage, the first flights over the most affected areas show seaside and even inland villages with flooded farmlands and roads, and nearly annihilated towns with the majority of their houses either roofless or flattened, as well as rivers still raging, damaged or impassable bridges, and little or no remaining functioning infrastructure. The storm has also divided the country in half, after a crucial bridge connecting the southern region to the rest of the country collapsed. When last I checked, there had been a hundred and eight deaths cited by Haitian authorities, though there will likely be more reported once the cutoff regions become accessible. Cell phones, the most common method of long-distance communication available to most people, have been down since the hurricane struck, making it impossible to get in touch with friends and family in the south, just as it was difficult to reach family members after the devastating earthquake of 2010. Thoughts of the earthquake bring to mind the dilemma facing most poor Haitians who live in both earthquake- and hurricane-prone areas and cannot afford to build seismically sound houses: concrete might protect folks from hurricanes, but it can become deadly during an earthquake.

The last contact I had with my friends in Gros Marin, a small rural village south of Les Cayes, one of the cities at the center of the storm, was the day before the hurricane struck, when I was asking where they would take shelter. The night the storm came ashore, I stayed up most of the night with my mother-in-law, who has a house in Gros Marin but was staying with my husband and me at our home in Miami, and listened to live Haitian radio reports on the Internet. What we heard most were people calling in from coastal areas to say that the sea was coming. The sea, along with the rain, was coming into the towns, farms, and churches where people had gone for shelter. Some people had to find their way out of those shelters, in the dark, to seek even higher ground. The calls to the radio stations were often brief and urgent-sounding. One man said that he heard a group of people screaming inside a house as the sea lapped at its doors. I am still wondering what happened to those people.

My mother-in-law eventually learned, through a text sent by one of her neighbors, that her property in Gros Marin, a place that hosted school-tutoring sessions, as well as summer sewing classes and small soccer matches, has been destroyed. Most of her neighbors’ homes are also either damaged or destroyed due to wind and flooding. We learned that twenty of our friends and neighbors are sleeping in one room on the one concrete building that remained standing in their area.

This story, I know, is being repeated all over Haiti, and it’s a story that many of us living abroad have already heard or will be hearing soon. Yet some even greater dangers lie ahead. Hurricane Matthew, as it has travelled over Haiti, has destroyed crops and harvests of Haitian staples, which could lead to food insecurity, hunger, and even famine as the waters recede. Also looming is the increased menace of mosquito- and waterborne illnesses, most prominently cholera, which has become an epidemic in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, an outbreak that United Nations peacekeepers have acknowledged their role in introducing.

Some of us who live in South Florida, which has one the largest populations of Haitians in the United States, now also find ourselves in Matthew’s path. At first it was expected to come to us weakened, as a tropical storm, but the latest forecast has it strengthening as it leaves the Bahamas to become a Category 4 or even a Category 5 storm. We will continue thinking about and trying to reach our friends and loved ones in Haiti, and eventually will find ways to help and support them, even as we, under somewhat more favorable conditions, do our best to shelter ourselves.