Tomas kills seven in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Hurricane Tomas weakened  to a tropical storm today after it lashed Haiti’s crowded  camps for earthquake survivors and coastal towns, triggering  flooding and mudslides that killed at least seven people.
The center of the storm was passing over the Turks and  Caicos islands and its maximum sustained winds had fallen to 70  miles per hour (110 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center  said in its latest bulletin.
Tomas was moving northeast at 15 mph (24 kph) and was  likely to weaken slowly over the next couple of days, it said.
Haitian authorities, struggling with the devastation of  January’s earthquake and a deadly cholera outbreak, believed  the worst from Tomas was over but the meteorologists warned of  more rain for parts of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the  Bahamas, Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos.
“Now that, relatively speaking, Haiti has escaped the  danger, we have to continue to be vigilant,” Haitian President  Rene Preval said at the presidential palace yesterday.
Four people died in the southwestern province of Grande  Anse, two in South province and one at Belle Anse in South-East  province, said Haiti’s civil protection director, Alta  Jean-Baptiste.
Scattered flooding was reported in the coastal towns of Les  Cayes, Jacmel and Leogane.
In the capital Port-au-Prince, still scarred by the Jan. 12  earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people, hundreds  of thousands of homeless survivors huddled under rain-drenched  tent and tarpaulin shelters in muddy encampments.
The United Nations and relief agencies have gone on maximum  alert to prepare for the possibility of another humanitarian  catastrophe in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian  Affairs said the storm could have dealt a far worse blow.
“We have been incredibly lucky,” OCHA spokeswoman Imogen  Wall said, while noting that “the flooding is still serious,  particularly in Leogane, because of the cholera situation.”
The United Nations said the storm almost certainly will  exacerbate a cholera epidemic that has killed 442 people and  sickened more than 6,700 so far.
With threats of floods and the spreading cholera epidemic,  Haiti faces major disruption just weeks before presidential and  legislative elections on Nov. 28. Electoral officials have not  postponed the vote.
Tomas swept across the Caribbean’s eastern islands as a  hurricane last weekend, killing at least five people in St.  Lucia before weakening to a tropical storm and then regaining  strength as a hurricane.
Jamaica escaped major damage yesterday but rains forced the  evacuation of several thousand people in eastern Cuba and the  Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on Hispaniola island.
As Tomas bore down, only some of the 1.3 million earthquake  survivors in Port-au-Prince were able to evacuate the temporary  camps to more secure structures, schools and government  shelters.
“Heavy rains did not come but I’m still not happy because  my home has lots of holes in it and a lot of water got inside,”  said Solange Louis-Charles, 40, as she washed plates outside a  house made of corrugated iron and tarpaulins.
Forecasters warned that rain still could produce flash  flooding and mudslides in deforested Haiti, where impoverished  peasants have for decades cut down trees for firewood and left  the hills and mountains bare and eroded.
Floods and mudslides from tropical storms and hurricanes in  2004 and 2008 killed several thousand people in Haiti,  especially in the northwest coastal city of Gonaives.
International donors have enough blankets, water containers  and hygiene kits to care for 125,000 people.
The World Food Program had stockpiled enough supplies to  feed more than 1 million people for six weeks, said Mark Ward,  director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at the  U.S. Agency for International Development.
The USS Iwo Jima was ready to send in helicopters, landing  craft, engineers and public health officials, Ward said.