Hurricane Matthew: Haiti dead reach 800 as south awaits aid
The UN has warned it could take days for the
full impact of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti to emerge, as the death toll soars to
more than 800.
The death toll
has doubled, and may rise, as rescue teams gain access to southern areas cut
off by the storm.
The World Food
Programme's Carlos Veloso says some of the hard-hit towns can only be reached
by air or sea.
Many of the
deaths in Haiti were in the south-western coast, which suffered the full force
of the hurricane this week.
Hurricane
Matthew is currently battering the
coastline of the US state of Florida but has been downgraded to a
Category Two storm, with sustained wind speed dropping to 110mph (177km/h).
Category Five is
the strongest on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
Rescue efforts
are under way to assess the destruction left in the wake of the most powerful
Caribbean storm in a decade.
Haiti's Civil
Protection Agency on Friday doubled the death toll from the hurricane from 400
to more than 800.
A definitive
number is taking time to obtain because of the intensity of the damage to
remote areas that are inaccessible because of flood water.
At least one major
town in the south - Jeremie - has been 80% destroyed, with aerial footage
showing the scale of destruction with hundreds of flattened houses.
Three other
towns in the south are reporting dozens of fatalities, according to Reuters
news agency. The mayor of the village of Chantal told the news agency that 86
people had died and 20 more were missing.
Civil Protection
Agency official Saint-Victor Jeune said his team had found another 82 bodies in
the mountainous outskirts of Jeremie. But they were unable to register these
with the Haitian authorities because of poor communications, he said speaking
to Associated Press news agency.
The storm passed
directly through the Tiburon peninsula - encompassing Haiti's entire southern
coast - driving the sea inland and flattening homes with winds of up to 230km/h
(145mph) and torrential rain.
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