Hurricane Tomas weakened to a tropical storm today after it lashed Haiti's crowded camps for earthquake survivors and coastal towns, triggering flooding and mudslides that killed at least seven people.
The centre of the storm was passing over the Turks and Caicos islands and its maximum sustained winds had fallen to 110kph, the US National Hurricane Center said in its latest bulletin.
Tomas was moving northeast at 24kph and is likely to weaken slowly over the next couple of days, it said.
Haitian authorities, struggling with the devastation of January's earthquake and a deadly cholera outbreak, believed the worst from Tomas was over but the meteorologists warned of more rain for parts of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos.
"Now that, relatively speaking, Haiti has escaped the danger, we have to continue to be vigilant," Haitian President Rene Preval said at the presidential palace yesterday.
Four people died in the southwestern province of Grande Anse, two in South province and one at Belle Anse in South-East province, said Haiti's civil protection director, Alta Jean-Baptiste. Scattered flooding was reported in the coastal towns of Les Cayes, Jacmel and Leogane.
In the capital Port-au-Prince, still scarred by the January 12 earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people, hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors huddled under rain-drenched tent and tarpaulin shelters in muddy encampments.
The United Nations and relief agencies have gone on maximum alert to prepare for the possibility of another humanitarian catastrophe in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. However, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the storm could have dealt a far worse blow.
"We have been incredibly lucky," spokeswoman Imogen Wall said, while noting that "the flooding is still serious, particularly in Leogane, because of the cholera situation".
Reuters