GONAIVES, Haiti — The death toll from Tropical Storm Jeanne threatened to reach 2,000 Wednesday, as tens of thousands of survivors wailed for food and water from rooftops, where they were marooned by knee-deep moats of mud and sewage.
Four days after residents were washed from their homes, more than 1,000 bodies had been counted in Gonaives and nearly 60 in other parts of the island's northwestern province, said Dieufort Deslorges of the civil protection agency. The number of missing rose past 1,200.
So desperate were the survivors that Argentine troops in a U.N. aid convoy had to fire eight shots to stop rioting outside a school so the World Food Program and the Oxfam charity could begin handing out the first loaves of bread and plastic bottles of water.
From the air, the city looked like a sprawl of aquatic campsites, with blue tarpaulins provided by the relief agencies offering crude shelter on some of the flat roofs, furnished with salvaged chairs, mattresses, tires and clothing.
"We could only save the children. We have nothing else -- it's all gone," said Wistha Jacques, whose four preschoolers slept on piles of damp clothing plucked from the filthy water that had reached the eaves Sunday. "We've had nothing to eat since we came up here and only droplets of water."
Like 80% of the inhabitants of this city of 200,000, Jacques and her family fled to the roof when the floodwater that had seeped into the streets Saturday suddenly surged after nightfall, becoming rivers of debris carrying off cars, trees and the contents of houses.
Mud-encrusted sculptures of cars tangled with uprooted trees and bedsteads were scattered throughout the city, which was blanketed by the stench of decaying corpses and animal carcasses.
At a makeshift home next door to the Jacques family, a mere 2-foot leap, teacher Previlon Pradel, who had yet to find his own family, joined dozens of neighbors under lean-tos made of sheets and sticks sprawled on mattresses drying in the steamy tropical heat. A box spring atop a wrecked BMW at the front of the house served as springboard up to the communal shelter.
"No one knows why this place is so cursed," he said of his city's central role in the rash of crises that lately have beset Haiti.
This bicentennial year was meant to be a celebration of the slave revolt that began in 1791 and culminated in the declaration in Gonaives of the first independent black republic in 1804.
