The expression "sheets of rain" meant nothing to me until I lived in Haiti. I used to sit on a terrace on a low hillside in Port-au-Prince and watch the progress of rainstorms as they descended on the capital. The city sat below me, palms waving in the ominous, wet breeze, tin roofs glinting in a slanting sun, jitneys honking through the traffic, roosters crowing at the wrong time of day. Above us, there would be a quick massing of clouds. Then, suddenly, the rain would come pounding down and the city would disappear, as if a shade had been lowered at the edge of the terrace. Sometimes it would rain like that for hours, and when the storm lifted and moved on, there was a rushing river where my street had been. Cars had washed to the bottom of the hill. Bodies floated out of shallow graves in the National Cemetery. Whole communities in the hillside slum near my house would be wrecked.
Foreseeable devastation
Human poverty is hugely susceptible to nature's depredations, and Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, has again and again been the victim of demonically destructive wind, rain and flood.
In Texas at the end of the week, and in Louisiana two weeks ago, mandatory evacuations moved thousands out of harm's way from this season's storms. In Cuba, a system of shelters and evacuations overseen by security forces saved countless lives -- only four people have been reported killed. In Haiti, there has been no such orderly exodus, and nearly two weeks after Hanna, which was the worst of the storms in Haiti, starving families were still trying to flee through mud and water, past the bodies of dead cattle and men, to higher ground.
According to varying estimates, this last month's four powerful storms have killed about 300 people in Haiti or as many as a 1,000 -- authorities now say they have given up counting -- and have made about 1 million people homeless, in a country of 7 million. In May, before the hurricane season even started, flash floods killed 2,000. In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne killed about 3,000 Haitians, many of them in Gonaives, a flatland, waterside city hard hit once again in this year's spate of Atlantic storms. In 1963, Hurricane Flora killed more than 8,000. This year's storms have come at the worst possible moment in Haiti's agricultural calendar -- destroying most of the country's crops and drowning or starving thousands of animals.
