Haiti gets battered by damaging floods as Caribbean prepares for hurricane season

At least one person died and a key bridge was destroyed in Haiti on Saturday as heavy rains triggered flooding in various parts of the Caribbean nation — a reminder that while storm experts are predicting at least one major hurricane this season and possibly as many as three major storms, any weather event involving rainfall can prove destructive.

In Haiti, crushing floodwaters inundated several regional departments, drowning agricultural fields and vehicles, and washing out parts of a new, temporary bridge installed 10 months ago to connect the southwestern quake-recovering city of Jérémie in the Grand’Anse to the rest of the country.

Earlier in the day, the country’s Civil Protection agency, which responds to disaster emergencies, reported that a man in his 40s had died and 14 others were rescued after their overloaded boat, the Métropole, capsized off the coast of Côte-de-Fer that morning. The boat was traveling to the southern coastal town of Marigot after departing Friday from Anse-à-Pitres near the border with the Dominican Republic.

While the rains had nothing to do with a named storm — this year’s Atlantic hurricane season began on Thursday, June 1 — it was a harsh reminder of Haiti’s vulnerabilities, something the head of the country’s Office of Civil Protection said concerns him as the hurricane season gets under way.

“We have secured some resources for training for our volunteers,” said Jerry Chandler, who on Saturday reminded Haitians not to cross overflowing rivers and to secure their belongings. “We still do not have resources for emergency equipment for them, but we are doing our best to keep them on board.”

As rains began pelting Haiti on Friday, the region’s disaster response agency, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, reminded member states that hurricane season, regardless of forecasts, is nothing to be taken lightly.

Elizabeth Riley, the head of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, CDEMA, said that the agency is ready to provide a speedy response with the help of international agencies. However, the agency continues to be concerned about the lack of urgency with which some people across the region respond to warnings to prepare — and even to evacuation.

“We are seeing scenarios where even though we get the different aspects of the early warning arrangements right, we have an understanding of the risks that are posed, we have information on forecasts...sometimes even those with the means are not responding in the way that they should,” Riley said. “And this is something that continues to concern us across the system because we are very much committed as disaster managers to making sure that we try to avoid loss of life. This is really important.”

Experts at both Colorado State and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have provided different forecasts on what can be expected in the tropics. Still, neither is predicting an above-average hurricane season. NOAA is forecasting a “near normal” or average hurricane activity in the Atlantic, with 12 to 17 named storms, five to nine of which can develop into hurricanes and one to four that could develop into a category 3 or strong hurricane. Meanwhile, Colorado State says it anticipates 15 named storms —seven hurricanes, with three being major hurricanes.

Among the factors influencing this year’s forecast is the end of the weather pattern known as La Niña after three years. La Nina refers to the cooling of water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. Now with the approach of El Niño — a warming of those temperatures — which tends to can make it more difficult for Atlantic hurricanes to form, experts remain concerned, especially in island nations where the slightest amount of heavy rainfall can created flooding and mudslides.

“El Niño’s potential influence on storm development could be offset by favorable conditions, local to the tropical basin,” she said. “Those conditions include the potential for an above-normal West African monsoon season, which produces African easterly waves and seeds some of the stronger and longer-lived Atlantic storms and warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, which creates more energy to fuel storm development.”

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Riley said it’s important for Caribbean populations to remember that, “it takes only one” storm to inflict damage and alter one’s life.

This message is also being conveyed in Haiti, where residents saw for themselves Saturday that any amount of rainfall can lead to loss of life and a major disaster in the environmentally vulnerable country.

Chandler, the head of Civil Protection office, said this hurricane season remains dangerous and “we have no clear idea of what the El Niño change is going to bring because the water temperatures on the Atlantic are very high.”

“We are already into a string of tropical waves that are causing torrential rains with more to come over Haiti this weekend, and subsequent flash floods,” he said Friday in an interview as the northwest city of Port-de-Paix reported flooding.

Another challenge he and United Nations agencies like the World Food Program and others are facing is the inability to pre-position supplies around the country due to the ongoing gang violence and a lack of financial resources, Chandler said.

One positive development, he noted, is the acquisition of the services of Starlink, the satellite internet constellation operated by American aerospace company SpaceX. It provides satellite Internet access coverage to over 54 countries and has been on trial in Haiti. Starlink will now provide around-the-clock communication with the country’s rural provinces, allowing for real-time updates in the event of a disaster. They are also rolling out satellite phones to bridge the gap in case commercial telecommunications shut down.

Haiti is among the member countries of CDEMA, which has also beefed up training for staff. The agency also has expanded its international relationships, Riley said, and as a result, this year it will have access to a state-of-the art, self-sufficient vessel to provide humanitarian and disaster support to affected countries and territories in the region. The ship will be posted in the region later this month by the humanitarian organization Global Support and Development, which helps at-risk communities better respond to disasters.

The vessel, she said, “will very much strengthen our disaster response capabilities in the region, particularly in the area of logistics, which is an area that we do always require additional assistance in,” Riley said.

The new relationship, Riley said, is the kind of partnerships and support the regional response agency is dependent on in order to be able to respond to disasters. CDEMA, which also receives funding from the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, also relied heavily on being able to access human resources that it has trained in member countries when disaster strikes. And while the unit’s financial challenges have no impact on its ability to respond to disaster this year, Riley said the financial challenges are a reality that needs addressing.

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In a talk the day before addressing the press, Riley raised the need for more support in a discussion about the climate crisis affecting the Caribbean region. Not only are national governments having to respond to deadly storms during hurricane season, but they are increasingly being exposing to droughts, heat waves, heavy rain and other potentially life-threatening events that demand help from regional disaster experts.

“We have been seeing, definitely, increasing complexity in the events that are happening in the Caribbean region, certainly from the climate side,” Riley said during a webinar sponsored by Global Americans. The group last month released a report, High-Level Working Group on Climate Change in the Caribbean.

Riley was joined by Ambassador Carlos Fuller, the permanent representative of Belize to the United Nations. A meteorologist by training, Fuller, prior to his appointment, was the regional and international liaison officer at the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center, where he was primary responsibility for coordinating the international climate change negotiation process for the 15-member Caribbean Community.

“If we look at the experiences from past events, I would say that the regional response mechanism has worked reasonably well in addressing events that are, yes, disruptive at the national level, but in terms of the catastrophic events, the system works well,” she said. “But we do need that international support to assist us.”

Fuller noted that not only are the dollar amount in damages increasing with every violent storm, but with climate change, “we’re seeing many more extreme events than we had before.”

“When I went to college to do meteorology, the rule of thumb was that it took a day to go from a depression to a storm, one more day to go from a category 1 another day to to go a category 2. Now it’s within 24 hours., you can go from nothing to a category 5. That is the massive, the explosive development you see.”