Hurricane Tomas was downgraded to a tropical storm early Saturday as it passed over the Turks and Caicos Islands, losing steam a day after battering seaside towns in Haiti.
Haiti was pummeled with 85 mph winds and from five to ten inches of rain. A foot of standing water fills the capital of Port-au-Prince, where four people are dead and two are missing. ...
Please join me in the flood.
It's been raining all night in Port-au-Prince and, for earthquake refugees living in tent cities, it has been a miserable night, reports CBS News producer John Bentley.
There over a million people living in the portable structures, and the rain has been coming down since the sun went down. The streets are flooded and a lot of rivers and streams are overflowing, causing a lot of problems. But as far as Hurricane Tomas goes, Haiti dodged a bullet - the eye missed Port-au-Prince.
If they didn't get the strong winds and major flooding they were worried about, the other problem will be how the storm affects the water and sewage supplies - important as Haiti battles a cholera epidemic in which 400 people have died.
source
The details:
On Friday, panicked residents fled a coastal city in Haiti that had been slammed twice already this decade by killer floods. The hurricane spared most earthquake-refugee camps in the capital but battered a seaside town to the west that was nearly destroyed by January's earthquake.
Coming ashore at Haiti's far southwestern edge, Tomas slammed the coastline with 85-mph winds and killed at least four people with storm surge and rains.
It then flooded camps harboring earthquake refugees, turning some into squalid islands in Leogane, a town west of the capital that lost 90 percent of its buildings and thousands of people in the Jan. 12 quake. Two people were missing in the city.
Tomas turned streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, into canals of flowing garbage. The storm largely spared the city's vast homeless encampments, however, allaying fears that an estimated 1.3 million displaced people would suffer from high winds and rain on hillsides and in parks and streets.
Haitians had high hopes that the storm would move on before triggering floods in Gonaives, a northwestern coastal city that completely flooded in 2004 and again in 2008, killing thousands. As rains fell on the city's slums of Raboteau and Jubilee, people living in the low-lying areas began heading for high ground.
And so the storm has passed Haiti. It has left a new disaster in its wake. And Haiti will now, again, fade from the traditional media and disappear behind a curtain. That would make this a great time to remember the suffering in Haiti and to send a donation-- even small donations mount up-- to Doctors Without Borders.
It would also be a very good time to scream and shout at your Congresspersons actually to get the billion in US aid that was promised to Haiti, to Haiti. Think Progress initially reported that all of this aid was being blocked by Senator Coburn. Then TP updated its story to imply that was not the case. And see this diary holding Coburn responsible. Regardless of who may ultimately be found to be responsible for this aid not being delivered to Haiti, we owe it to those suffering in Haiti to demand that the US Government immediatelhy follow through and dispatch the needed aid. That might alleviate some of the suffering in Haiti.
For more detail and photos, please visit allie123's Friday diary .
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updated from The Dream Antilles