Haiti urges 1 million to flee camps ahead of Tomas

Up to 10 inches of rain expected; severe flooding is feared                     

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — More than 1 million people were advised to leave earthquake homeless camps in Haiti's rubble-choked capital Wednesday as disaster officials watched the approach of Tropical Storm Tomas.

But few of the earthquake survivors who have spent nearly 10 months alternately baking and soaking under plastic tarps and tents have anywhere to go.
Painfully slow reconstruction from the quake, prior storms and the recent committing of resources to fight a growing cholera epidemic have left people with few options and overtaxed aid workers struggling to help.
"We are using radio stations to announce to people that if they don't have a place to go, but they have friends and families, they should move into a place that is secure," said civil protection official Nadia Lochard, who oversees the department that includes Port-au-Prince.
Concerns are even greater in the western reaches of Haiti's southern peninsula, where heavy flooding is predicted.
Disaster officials have extended a red alert, their highest storm warning, to all regions of the country, as the storm is expected to wind its way up the west coast of Hispaniola through storm-vulnerable Gonaives and Haiti's No. 2 city, Cap-Haitien, sometime Friday.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami announced a tropical storm warning for Haiti, along with tropical storm watches for Jamaica, the western Dominican Republic, eastern Cuba and the southeastern Bahamas as well as Turks and Caicos.
"Tomas could be approaching hurricane strength as the center nears Haiti" on Friday, the center said.
The storm, which strengthened from a tropical depression during the day, on Wednesday afternoon was 305 miles south of Port-au-Prince with maximum winds of 45 mph. It began to make an expected right turn toward the Greater Antilles, moving north-northwest at 6 mph.
The center said the storm could dump up to 10 inches of rain over much of Haiti.
Even just five inches could cause catastrophic floods in the severely deforested country, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
In Jamaica, soldiers will evacuate hundreds of people in the island's eastern region Thursday and move them into emergency shelters ahead of the storm, Information Minister Daryl Vaz said.
"We will be going all out to make good sense prevail," he said at a news conference Wednesday.
Most of the people who will be evacuated are squatters living along unstable gullies that often flood during heavy rainstorms.
Kareen Bennett, a forecaster with Jamaica's Meteorological Service, said heavy rains will lash the eastern region by Friday morning.
Jamaica is still struggling to recuperate from floods unleashed by Tropical Storm Nicole in late September that killed at least 13 people and caused an estimated $125 million in damage.
People who are still using boats to move about in the island's rural western regions also will be moved to shelters, said Ronald Jackson with the emergency management office.
Tomas has already killed at least 14 people and left seven missing in the eastern Caribbean nation of St. Lucia, where it caused more than $37 million in damage. In nearby St. Vincent, the storm wrecked more than 1,200 homes and caused nearly $24 million in damages to crops, especially bananas — one of St. Vincent's top commodities.
It could be the first big storm to strike Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake killed as many as 300,000 people and forced millions from their homes. It would also be the first tropical storm or hurricane to hit since 2008, when Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike battered Haiti in the space of a month, killing nearly 800 people and wiping out 15 percent of the economy.
Aid workers are scrambling to prepare but are badly short of supplies including shelter material because of the responses already under way to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake and an unprecedented cholera outbreak that has killed more than 330 people and hospitalized more than 4,700.
A U.S. Navy vessel, the amphibious warship Iwo Jima, was steaming toward Haiti to provide disaster relief.
An enormous international aid effort flowed into Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake, but reconstruction has barely begun, in part because donors have not come through with promised funds. The United States has not provided any of the $1.15 billion in reconstruction aid it pledged last March.
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