Tomas lashes Haiti, leaving six dead - Sydney Morning Herald

AFP

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 5 AFP - Hurricane Tomas lashed Haiti with fierce winds and rain on Friday, leaving six people dead and closing the main airport. But it appeared to have spared the hundreds of thousands who rode out the storm in flimsy tent camps.

Rains continued off and on for hours after the storm moved on to Cuba, and flooding cut off some parts of the country while authorities warned of the heightened risk of mudslides.

"All departures and arrivals at Toussaint Louverture airport (in Port-au-Prince) are cancelled. Normal traffic will resume on Saturday," airport authorities said in a statement.

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The southern town of Leogane was completely under water, said Philippe Joseph, a civil defence official, who said water was three metres deep in parts of the town.

"We are going to have more victims because of the floods and mudslides, but we cannot yet reach the communities most affected," he told AFP.

In Port-au-Prince, Haitians were up to their ankles in water in some of the huge refugee camps that have grown up around the city since a devastating earthquake that killed 250,000 people in January.

But the canvas and tarpaulin shelters that hundreds of thousands of people call home appeared to have withstood the storm better than expected, thanks to pre-storm preparations, including hastily dug drainage ditches and sandbag barriers.

"So fortunately for them we can say that they appear to have made it through," Andrea Koppel of the American Red Cross told CNN.

However, six people were reported killed in floods and house collapses elsewhere in Haiti.

Two of the dead were in Leogane, two more died in the towns of Beaumont and de Leon near the city of Jeremie, and a fifth died in the town of Anglais, Haitian media reported.

A sixth person was reported killed on Thursday before the storm hit as he tried to cross a rain-swollen river in a vehicle in Grande Anse.

Many smaller towns in western Haiti were cut off from the outside world after flooding damaged already neglected roads in rural areas that were difficult to pass in good weather.

The government said it had taken steps to accommodate as many as 100,000 people in schools, churches and hospitals - a fraction of the 1.3 million left homeless by January's earthquake.

The US State Department quoted Haiti's Department of Civil Protection as estimating that 50 per cent of the people living in resettlement camps "did leave of their own accord" to safer housing.

The centre of category one Tomas was about 65 kilometres north of Haiti late on Friday, and a hurricane warning for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was downgraded to a tropical storm warning, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

The storm, packing maximum winds of 120 kilometres per hour, was heading toward Turks and Caicos islands at 22 kilometres per hour.

The broad storm front, however, was still dumping rain on the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, parts of which could see 125mm to 250mm of rain, the NHC warned, with 380mm in isolated spots.

"These rains could cause life-threatening flash floods and mud slides over mountainous terrain," it added.

Tomas threatened further havoc in impoverished Haiti just as it battles a growing cholera outbreak that has killed 442 people.

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