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AFTER-EFFECTS
Hurricane Matthew was the most devastating hurricane to hit the Caribbean in some time. Several Caribbean Islands for the most part, escaped its fury. It could have been worse for those countries. The raging storm took its toll on Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with maximum sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. It was the most powerful storm in the region since Hurricane Felix in 2007.
Matthew damaged houses, uprooted trees, toppled utility poles, scattered debris and flooded many areas in those countries. There were no deaths in Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica or Barbados. Four deaths were reported in the Dominican Republic.
Haiti was less fortunate. Over 1000 people perished.
Haiti is too poor to weather such a powerful storm. Matthew devastated the territory which never had the resources needed to invest in disaster preparedness mechanisms. In the hours leading up to the storm there were warnings, but many Haitians continued with their daily chores. In a country already so ravaged, there were not too many places for some people to seek shelter.
In the aftermath, bodies were seen everywhere; the government struggled to provide food, water and shelter to the living. Many will succumb to starvation and cholera in the coming days.
In Haiti, over 7000 homes were destroyed with more than 350,000 homeless and in need of assistance. With a population of 10.3 million people, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere, with almost four million people living in extreme poverty. Its shoddy buildings in the shanty towns where most of the urban residents live, certainly are not constructed under proper building codes. Engineers often use codes established for other countries that do not necessarily account for the country’s risks.
Matthew came just six years after an earthquake that measured 7 on the Richter scale killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed three quarters of Port-au-Prince’s buildings, including the Presidential Palace.
Matthew plunged half of the Caribbean’s oldest nation into darkness, despair and uncertainty. Haiti is ill-prepared to deal with such disasters. Its soil already holds the lives of far too many of its citizens taken by extreme natural disasters.
While highlighting the misery of underdevelopment in Haiti, which is still recovering from the devastating earthquake in 2010, it seems that the recent storm will rekindle the debate about the international community helping Haiti to erect stronger structures to withstand the full impact of natural disasters.
Matthew comes at an especially tense moment for Haiti. Haitians were expected to go to the polls on Sunday to cast their vote for a new president of the republic. However, Matthew has postponed the elections indefinitely. This is just one of the after-effects.
Rarely has a disaster occurred in such close proximity to a scheduled major political event as it has with this election. However, a global outpouring of sympathy similar to the 2010 earthquake disaster drew support from around the world with pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars to help the people of Haiti. Haiti is broken and is urgently in need of help.
After storming through Haiti and the other Caribbean countries, Matthew sideswiped the East coast of Florida, but did not make landfall in the state. With high winds and torrential rainfall, the storm killed four people, damaged houses and toppled trees and utility poles and left more than one million without power.
As Hurricane Matthew ploughed northward through Georgia and into South Carolina and North Carolina, it triggered mass evacuations along the East coast of the US. All told, Matthew has left 40 dead, including 26 in South Carolina and more than $10 billion in damage to properties in the U.S. It was the worse hurricane to hit the U.S in more than a decade.
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