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Subscribe to RSSThose considered most vulnerable were urged to move into an evacuation camp housed in a school building, but others with nowhere else to go were digging trenches to avoid the water. Haiti's population remains especially vulnerable due to the country's sprawling shanty towns. NBC's Mark Potter reports.
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti – As the winds picked up strength in Haiti, concern grew Friday among dozens of aid workers trying to prepare more than 400,000 tent city residents to face Tropical Storm Isaac.
Gallons of water and emergency kits were loaded swiftly into trucks at the American Red Cross headquarters in Port au Prince.
The head of the organization in Haiti, Sandrine Capelle Manuel, said her main concern is flooding and mudslides.
Handout / Reuters
Members of the International Organization for Migration register displaced people who will take shelter at a school before the arrival of Tropical Storm Isaac in Port au Prince, Haiti, on Friday.
“Over 80 percent of the people are living under the poverty line, and a lot of people are living on no-built areas on the bottom of a ravine,” she said.
Just a few miles east, at a camp in the suburb of Pétion-Ville, hundreds of earthquake survivors received leaflets with drawings showing how to better secure their tents during the storm. They have been homeless since January 12, 2010, when an earthquake crumbled their homes and took more than 200,000 lives.
Chiara Lucchini Gilera, is the Camp and Relocations Program Manager for J/P HRO, the relief organization trying to help those evacuees survive Isaac.
Isaac to hit Haiti overnight; tropical storm watch for southern Florida
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“I expect to find people without places, with lots of things washed away,” Gilera said.
Workers for the non-profit organization founded by American actor Sean Penn plan to shelter the most vulnerable -- the handicapped, pregnant women and the elderly -- at the camp school, but the rest will have to be turned away because there is not enough room.
The American Red Cross estimated there are at least 557 tent cities remaining in Haiti since the earthquake and no place for most of the people in those camps to seek shelter.
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Leave a Comment:
To better secure tents costs money. Who is going to pay for it? The tent squatter's sure don't have any money to buy rope or stakes or anything like that. So giving them advice sure isn't going to help much! Smart ones will leave the ravine for higher ground and not try to ride it out lest flooding create a historical disaster.
I would like to know what happened to the BILLIONS of dollars in aid sent to Haiti.
Wait a dad gum minute.....didn't I read somewhere that Mr. Clinton was in the area to "coordinate" (or is that "squirrel away into private bank accounts" ?) the funds use after the earthquake ?
Yep:
Oh, then the critcism for him being the Co-Chairman of the LACKLUSTER rebuilding effort:
Heck, he is going to bring down the roof at the Democratic National Convention with his superior techniques.
Wait another minute.....Mrs. Clinton visited there.......(you fill in the blanks)
And the Haitians are STILL IN TENTS.
AMEN Ido.......Your first sentence was running through my mind as I came to your post, only I had a four letter word in it....."what in the HELL happened to all that money?"
Great post!!! Now is someone would just answer that question.
Someone needs to just take the money donated to them after the earthquake and buy a small island and relocate them. Tell them, "Here's your second chance. You are on your own, sink or swim, you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Fresh natural resources, we'll give you a hand with building homes and hospitals, give you advice only, take no monetary rewards for our help.
"Now get to it, it's all on you."
Oh that's right. The disaster capitalists come in after the disaster not before.
cholera suits their entire way of life. before the earthquake the US kept these slackers alive for decades. 80
the same trash we've been keeping alive for decades. 80% murderers and child molestors. yea i've been there plenty. use to go over there as a merchant sailor. 12 yr old girls selling their 5 yr old daughters as whores, infant boys to American faggots. every body thank Haiti for AIDS in the US then you got filthy mud rolling sex orgies they like to call religion. thank you Nepal for the cholera.you have helped our hemisphere from the boogey man lovin scum of the region. no wonder people paddle a log to leave that dirt hole.