Hurricane death toll jumps sharply in hard-hit Haiti

Haitian officials today dramatically raised the known death toll to 108 from Hurricane Matthew as they finally began to reach corners of the country that had been cut off by the rampaging storm.

Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph announced that at least 108 had died, up from a previous count of 23. That raised the hurricane's overall toll across the Caribbean to 114.

Officials were especially concerned about the department of Grand-Anse, located on the northern tip of the peninsula that was slammed by the Category 4 storm, which severed roads and communications links.

"(It) got hit extremely hard," said Guillaume Albert Moleon, Interior Ministry spokesman.
 

Officials with the Civil Protection Agency said 38 of the known deaths were reported in Grand-Anse. People in the region's devastated main city, Jeremie, faced an immediate hunger crisis, said Maarten Boute, chairman of telecom Digicel Haiti, who flew to the city in a helicopter.

Joseph, the interior minister, said food and water were urgently needed, noting that crops have been leveled, wells inundated by seawater and some water treatment facilities destroyed. Before hitting Haiti, the storm was blamed for four deaths in the Dominican Republic, one in Colombia and one in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

So far there were no reports of casualties from better-equipped Cuba or the Bahamas, which was being raked by the hurricane today.

In Haiti's southern peninsula towns, where Matthew hit around daybreak Tuesday with 145 mph (235 kph) winds, there was wreckage and misery everywhere. In Aquin, a coastal town outside Les Cayes, people trudged through mud around the wreckage of clapboard houses and tiny shops.

Civil aviation authorities reported counting 3,214 destroyed homes along the southern peninsula, where many families live in shacks with sheet metal roofs and don't always have the resources to escape harm's way.

The government has estimated at least 350,000 people need some kind of assistance after the disaster, which U.N. Deputy Special Representative for Haiti Mourad Wahba has called the country's worst humanitarian crisis since the devastating earthquake of 2010.

In coming days, US military personnel equipped with nine helicopters were expected to start arriving to help deliver food and water to hard-hit areas.

As recovery efforts in Haiti continued, Matthew pummeled the Bahamian capital of Nassau today with winds of 140 mph (220 kph). Authorities shut down the power grid to protect it against the winds.

In nearby Cuba, Matthew blew across that island's sparsely populated eastern tip, destroying dozens of homes and damaging hundreds in the island's easternmost city, Baracoa. But the government oversaw the evacuation of nearly 380,000 people and strong measures were taken to protect communities and infrastructure, UN officials said.

Matthew was on a path forecast to take it close to the US East Coast, where authorities ordered large-scale evacuations.