Bodies remained in the streets and in growing piles outside morgues in a Haitian city that has been devastated by floods that have torn apart families and left hungry crowds mobbing truckloads of aid.
The death toll from deluges unleashed by Tropical Storm Jeanne climbed to more than 700, Haitian officials said, with more than 600 of them in the city of Gonaives alone. More than 1,000 others were declared missing.
Jeanne, meanwhile, regained hurricane strength over the open Atlantic and could head back toward the United States and threaten the storm-battered south-east coast, including Florida, as early as this weekend, forecasters said today.
It was too soon to tell where or if Jeanne would hit, but the National Hurricane Centre in Miami warned it could kick up dangerous surf and rip currents along islands in the north-west and central Bahamas and along the south-eastern US coast over the next few days.
Carcasses of pigs, goats and dogs still floated in muddy waters slowly receding from the streets in Gonaives,
Not a house escaped damage. The homeless sloshed through the streets carrying belongings on their heads, while people with houses that still had roofs tried to dry scavenged clothes.
Flies buzzed around bloated corpses piled high at the city's three morgues. The electricity was off, and the stench of death hung over the city. Relatives waited outside a morgue set up in the flood-damaged General Hospital all day to identify and bury victims.
But vehicles to carry bodies to the cemetery never arrived. Most bodies remained unidentified. Mr Destilor Aldajus, a 50-year-old farmer, said he and his six children climbed onto their roof to escape the floods. But he was at the morgue looking for his wife. "I couldn't find her, but I knew the water had taken her," he said.
Red Cross volunteers put more than 100 bodies into body bags, leaving them in a pile outside the morgue. "We're going to start burying people in mass graves," said Toussaint Kongo-Doudou, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in
Mr Renel Corvil, a 32-year-old farmer, said he had come to the morgue every day since Saturday to look for his four missing children. Yesterday, he found them.
But after waiting all day for bodies to be taken to the cemetery, he left to bury a fifth child that already had been transported to the graveyard. Waterlines up to 10 feet high on Gonaives' buildings marked the worst of the storm that sent torrents of water and mudslides down denuded hills, destroying homes and crops.
Mr Dieufort Deslorges, spokesman for
"It appears many were swept away to the sea, there are bodies still buried in mud and rubble, or floating in water, and that's not to mention the hundreds who are missing and the places we have not yet been able to reach." Some 1,056 people were missing, almost all from Gonaives, he said.
Mr Deslorges said some 250,000 people were homeless across the country, and the storm destroyed at least 4,000 homes and damaged unknown thousands more.
Floods in
Most trees have been chopped down to make charcoal, which most of the eight million people use to cook. Jeanne came four months after devastating floods along
Haiti 's third-largest city with some 250,000 people. Haiti . Haiti 's civil protection agency, said he expected the death toll to rise as reports come in from outlying villages and rescuers dig through mudslides and rubble.
Mr Deslorges said rescue workers reported recovering 691 bodies - about 600 of them in Gonaives and more than 40 in northern Port-de-Paix. "Certainly there are more than 700 dead, certainly there are dozens more dead," Deslorges said.
Haiti are particularly devastating because the countryside is almost completely deforested, leaving few roots to hold back rushing waters or mudslides. Haiti 's southern border with the Dominican Republic. Some 1,700 bodies were recovered and 1,600 more were presumed dead.
PA