Hurricanes

It's strange - it's 8.30pm and so quiet. It had been raining heavily last night and this morning but now I hear nothing. Normally at this time, I would hear a cacophony of music from all the bars around my home and cars, motorbikes and generators and people laughing and shouting in the streets. But nothing - just dogs barking and the hum of insects.

The reason, of course, is Ike which has just passed near Haiti today. From all accounts, it could have been much much worse but coming on the back of Gustav and Hanna...

The last couple of weeks have been crazy - not so much from work but mostly emotionally from a mix of worry over hurricanes and a particularly nasty investigation that I'm involved in. The latter will hopefully finally be resolved over the next couple of days. The former will takes years if that.

So; Fay, Gustav, Hanna and now Ike... Four hurricane/tropical storms in the space of 3 weeks. Figures vary but the immediate death toll is most definitely in the hundreds, and Haiti is a country where the death toll from the aftermath will most likely exceed the immediate. The city of Gonaive in the north had been described by a UN envoy as "hell on earth" after Hanna, which seems an accurate summation from all accounts and now, the bridge that was the last land route into the city has collapsed due to the Ike, and the city of 300,000 is now even more cut off from aid.

A hurricane struck Gonaive 4 years ago resulting in over 4000 deaths and food rioting. The situation is likely to be much worse this year: there are already severe food shortages - witness the food rioting in April - and the hurricanes have made the situation worse with a reported 60% rise in food staples which were already more than most people could afford. Add to that the continuing humanitarian crisis in the south of Haiti from Gustav and the government can't cope. I'm not sure that the UN or us NGOs can do much better to be perfectly honest. Aside from the sheer humanitarian catastrophe always features in the aftermath of natural disaters in poor states with no infrastructure or safety nets, the resultant political fallout from this is going to be ugly. Really ugly.

As for us, we're been trying to put together an emergency response to Gustav and Hanna but it's obviously too soon to do anything until we can assess the damage that Ike has wreaked. Even then, I'm not sure how much we can do - we're already overstretched with large new emergency responses to food security and there's obviously no point taking money from donors for projects we don't have the capacity or manpower to put in place. But then, if there's no other alternative, then we'd deal. I feel like it's the calm before the storm - a couple of days of assessment and then the madness.

This is an Al Jazeera broadcast that was taken a few days ago, just after Hanna. It gives an impression of just how difficult and precarious the situation is in Gonaive especially, but over all the whole country:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/09/20089623246151559.html

Anyway, making myself a cup of tea now and trying not to think of what's coming.