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Last Updated: Dec 15, 2007 - 2:55:41 AM |
CAMAGUEY, Cuba - Tropical Storm Ernesto killed at least two people in Haiti, but otherwise let the Caribbean off relatively easy before heading north for Florida on Tuesday.
Tens of thousands of people who evacuated before Ernesto drenched eastern Cuba began returning home Tuesday morning as the storm pulled away from the island's northern coast. They were grateful to find houses still standing and belongings dry after the storm turned out to be relatively tame.
"I'm desperate to go back, one misses their bed, and their home," Ramona Montero Ruiz, said in Santa Cruz del Sur, a low-lying community in the eastern province of Camaguey considered at high risk for flooding.
No deaths, injury or major damage were reported in Cuba, where communist officials regularly evacuate huge numbers of people before storms to minimize loss of life. More than 700,000 people were evacuated in recent days in this country of 11.2 million.
And none of the prisoners held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay were exposed to the weather although the storm passed over the area on Monday. For years now, detainees have been kept in cells without windows or with a single window that can be covered with a heavy steel hurricane shutter. The cells replaced the open steel cages where prisoners were initially held.
Military personnel, except for guards and people in other critical jobs, stayed in their quarters until the storm passed, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Department of Defense spokesman.
But Ernesto was blamed for the deaths of at least two people in Haiti, including a woman washed to sea from a tiny southern island on Sunday, the country's civil protection agency said Tuesday. No details were available on the second victim.
The storm weakened from a hurricane as it skirted Haiti's southern coast Sunday. It destroyed more than 200 homes in the impoverished country, wiped out banana crops and washed away a bridge linking the southern peninsula with the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Elisabeth Verlutyn, an emergency coordinator with the Pan American Health Organization, said Ernesto devastated poor people living in flimsy shacks along rivers and coastlines, including fishermen who lost their boats.
"One simple rainfall can put them back a few years," Verlutyn said. "If this had happened on a well-developed Caribbean island, they would have been able to handle the rain."
U.N. peacekeepers were working with local officials to ensure people hit by the storm were getting help, U.N. officials said.
The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, saw little damage compared with some past storms and no deaths or injuries were reported.
Nevertheless, flooding and landslides in the capital of Santo Domingo and nearby San Cristobal province damaged about 400 homes and forced the evacuation of 1,655 people.
The Dominican agriculture secretary said the heavy rains along the country's southern coast were beneficial, telling the newspaper El Caribe that the extra rainfall would be good for crops after a relatively dry summer.
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