Residents flee as hurricane batters Haiti coast

Panicked residents fled a coastal city that has been hit twice already this decade by huge floods as an intensifying Hurricane Tomas moved up Haiti’s north western coast.

Panicked residents fled a coastal city that has been hit twice already this decade by huge floods as an intensifying Hurricane Tomas moved up Haiti’s north western coast.

The hurricane spared most earthquake-refugee camps in the capital Port-au-Prince but battered a seaside town to the west that was nearly destroyed by January’s earthquake.

Coming ashore at Haiti’s far south-western edge, the Category One storm slammed the coastline with 85mph winds and killed at least four people with storm surge and rains.

It then flooded camps harbouring earthquake refugees, turning some into squalid islands in Leogane, a town west of the capital that lost 90% of its buildings and thousands of people in the January 12 quake.

Two people were missing in the city.

Tomas turned streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, into canals of flowing rubbish.

The storm largely spared the city’s vast homeless encampments, however, allaying fears that an estimated 1.3 million displaced people would suffer from high winds and rain on hillsides and in parks and streets.

Haitians had high hopes that the storm would move on before triggering floods in Gonaives, a north-western coastal city that completely flooded in 2004 and again in 2008, killing thousands.

As rains fell on the city’s slums of Raboteau and Jubilee, people living in the low-lying areas began heading for high ground.

“It’s not a major flood, but it’s flooding in some areas,” Doctors Without Borders spokesman Francois Servranckx said.

Earlier in the day, police in Gonaives evacuated more than 200 inmates from one prison to a town farther down the coast.

Early today, a hurricane warning was in effect for Haiti, the South-eastern Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, said the US Hurricane Centre in Miami, Florida.

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