Haiti bears brunt, with 136 dead and at least 350,000 needing help, as tempest beats path towards Florida
Hurricane Matthew slammed into the Caribbean, killing at least 140 people, almost all of them in Haiti, and picking up speed as it stormed northward toward Florida.
The hurricane has claimed at least 136 lives in Haiti, Reuters reported Thursday, two days after the monster storm ripped through the poorest country in the Americas. The hurricane left 50 dead in the single town of Roche-a-Bateau, on Haiti’s south coast, which local deputy Ostin Pierre-Louis said was “devastated”.
Haiti’s government has estimated at least 350,000 people need some kind of assistance after the disaster, which UN Deputy Special Representative for Haiti Mourad Wahba has called the country’s worst humanitarian crisis since the devastating earthquake of 2010.
International aid groups are already appealing for donations for a lengthy recovery effort.
US military personnel equipped with nine helicopters are expected to start arriving in the capital Port-au-Prince to help deliver food and water to hard-hit areas.
Four people have been killed in Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, Reuters reported.
There was also one death in Colombia and one in St Vincent and the Grenadines.
After hitting the Caribbean, Hurricane Matthew picked up speed as it headed toward Florida growing from a Category 3 to a Category 4 storm and prompting massive evacuations.
In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott said the state, its skies already darkening from the deadly storm’s outer bands of rain, could be facing its “biggest evacuation ever.”
It barreled over the Bahamas and was expected to scrape nearly the entire length of Florida’s Atlantic coast beginning Thursday evening. From there, forecasters said, it could push its way just off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina before veering off to sea.
About 2 million people in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina were warned to head inland.
Forecasters said the storm could dump up to 15 inches of rain in some spots and cause a storm surge of five to eight feet.
“This is a dangerous storm,” Scott warned. “The storm has already killed people. We should expect the same impact in Florida.”
Hurricane Matthew is the strongest hurricane to hit the Caribbean since Hurricane Felix in 2007, during which 130 people died.
Earlier this week, it hit Cuba and Haiti with 140-mile per hour (225 kph) winds and torrential rain.
As reported by The Times of Israel