General News
Everybody failed
Thrice-built house embodies Haiti aid shortfalls
JONATHAN M KATZ, Associated Press Writer
Monday, January 05, 2009
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| A youth sits in an area of flooded homes after recent storms in Gonaives, Haiti, Wednesday, December 3, 2008. While more than $70 million in US and UN aid after Tropical Storm Jeanne went to immediate relief such as food, medical aid and putting people back to work, little went to flood control, according to an Associated Press review of relief spending. |
GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) - The farmer camps in a crude tent of broken sandbags as he guards the foundation of his destroyed home and his last possessions: a pickaxe, a hoe and some charcoal.
This is the third time Olisten Elerius is preparing to build his tiny cinderblock house. Four years ago, Tropical Storm Jeanne flooded it and drowned his father, sister and nephew. Then, late last summer, Tropical Storm Hanna swallowed it along with his daughter and another sister. It could happen again.
After Jeanne struck in 2004, more than $70 million in aid went to immediate relief such as food, medical aid and jobs, but little went to flood control, according to an Associated Press review of relief spending. Despite pledges to prevent such devastation in the future, few projects to build drains, fix roads and stop erosion were even attempted.
In other parts of Haiti, US officials launched an ambitious flood control project. But it took three and a half years to plan and was not placed in Gonaives because of a lack of funding.
So when four major storms hit within a month last year, nothing stopped the La Quinte River from roaring over its banks again. It inundated farmers like Elerius on its way to the centre of Gonaives, where men, women and children swam for miles through swirling waters to escape. The storms killed 793 people and caused $1 billion in damage.
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| Flood victims carry sacks of rice they received from an international aid organisation in Gonaives, Haiti, Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008. (Photos: AP) |
"The authorities were always coming here to take pictures and measure things," Elerius said. "The words in their mouths said they would help, but they never did anything."
Top officials agree that efforts fell short.
"I think we were very successful in getting Gonaives back on its feet," Alexandre Deprez, an official for the US Agency for International Development, said of the work after Jeanne. "But it is true that we didn't put the time and the resources to do what needs to be done in the longer term."
Haiti's floods are not natural disasters, but a direct result
of widespread deforestation, erosion and poverty. Farmers cut trees for charcoal and plant shallow-rooted crops. Rains that would be forgotten elsewhere can kill thousands.
In 2004, Elerius was working in the neighbouring Dominican Republic when Tropical Storm Jeanne came twisting like a wounded animal out of the northern sky, sending a wall of water through his cinderblock home and sweeping away his father, sister and nephew. Gonaives residents fled to their rooftops as rivers broke their banks, overflowing morgues with bloated corpses.
A horrified world pledged to help. Elerius returned home just as the money and the white SUVs of non-governmental organisations began flowing into Gonaives, in the north of Haiti.
The U. appealed for $37 million in flood relief. Washington would donate more than $45 million, first for emergency food and supplies and then through USAID for the two-year, $34 million Tropical Storm Jeanne Recovery Programme.
Disaster officials, newspapers and aid workers called for well-planned, well-financed, long-term aid. Haitian officials told the agencies to spend the money on projects that would save lives: secure rivers, fix roads, design better canals, build homes with better drainage to the sea.
But the UN member states, distracted by the Indian Ocean tsunami four months later, raised less than half their funding target.
Work was hampered by violence and insecurity. The Inter-American Development Bank provided about $10 million in loans, mostly for construction of a small drainage system. That project was abandoned by Haitian contractors after bandits stole the cement and steel, IDB representative Philippe Dewez said.
Washington sent money mostly for short-term projects: clean-up, restoration and repair of basic services such as schools, health clinics, roads, bridges and homes. In 2005, the US Government Accountability Office reported that US organisations cleared more than two million cubic feet of mud and restored the livelihoods of 48,000 people. But the GAO said they failed to meet an already reduced target for houses and completed no roads or bridges.
Elerius rebuilt his family's flimsy home at Mapou, a flat plain on the outskirts of the city, just 50 feet from the La Quinte River after it descends from barren mountains toward the sea.
On the denuded hillside, USAID said projects to grow plant cover and build terraces have restored 3,700 acres of the La Quinte watershed - two per cent of the basin. But few trees are visible, and local officials said most saplings were eaten by goats.
Corruption watchdogs with Transparency International said public funds - nobody seems to know exactly how much - were distributed with little oversight by the US-backed interim government.
Soon after Jeanne, USAID commissioned a study of Haiti's watersheds, which led to an ambitious $18-million effort to reduce flooding. Work did not begin until February 2008.
The report recommended action in high-risk flood areas, including Gonaives. But the US Congress only gave enough money for the agency to start in two smaller, less populated watersheds - Limbe in the north and Mountrouis in the west, both more than 40 miles away from Gonaives. Some money went to a project on a Port-au-Prince river last year.
"With the funding that we were given we said to ourselves, 'Why go into a place where you're not going to make a difference'? " Deprez told The Associated Press. "Go into a place where you can focus and make a difference and test the approach that
was recommended."
It will take five years to know the effects of the pilot flood-control programmes. Officials then hope to replicate them elsewhere.
But the storms didn't wait.
Starting in mid-August, Tropical Storm Fay hit Haiti, followed by Gustav, Hanna and Ike. They destroyed thousands of homes, devastated crops and set the country back decades. Starving families, whose plight had fuelled April riots, got
even hungrier.
On the dark afternoon of September 2, 2008 in Gonaives, there was no warning as mountain run-off began to gather in ravines. Officials were not given orders to evacuate, and in any case no plan was in place. There was nobody to clear fallen trees that had jammed a bridge on the La Quinte River and caused it to divert the day before.
Elerius was in town getting supplies when he heard radio reports about a new storm. Even as rain fell in Gonaives, radio broadcasts in Port-Au-Prince, the capital, repeated predictions that it would veer to the north, away from Haiti.
It was only word of mouth that sent Elerius running home. There he found the river had again become an ocean, his family submerged and his house disintegrating.
He dived into the water and pulled his mother and four-year-old son Jonslay to safety. Then he yelled for his six-year-old daughter, Joniska, and his 21-year-old little sister, Jimele.
Neither called back.
This time, without a network of roads that could withstand the flooding, Gonaives was trapped. A Haitian-funded causeway needed to connect it to the capital, 80 miles away across the cactus plain of Savanne Desolee, was left half-finished, denying scores of families a way out. Refugees climbed its scaffolding to escape the rising waters.
Others were stranded on their rooftops. It took four days for the UN to bring in ample food aid by ship.
Some development workers say the reduced death toll last year - in the hundreds instead of thousands - validates their efforts. But survivors and local officials say more survived this time because the memory of Jeanne sent them running for higher ground.
Today in Gonaives, homeless families crowd
tent neighbourhoods. Men scrounge for fish in stagnant floodwaters. Schoolgirls wear sunglasses and surgical masks to block the clouds of dirt that cover the city. The road to Port-au-Prince is still blocked by an enormous lake.
As former Gonaives disaster management coordinator Faustin Joseph said, "Everybody failed."
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