Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas and one shattered by a 2010 earthquake and ravaged by a cholera epidemic, began three days of mourning on Sunday for victims of Hurricane Matthew as relief officials grappled with the unfolding devastation in the Caribbean country’s hard-hit south.
Matthew, meanwhile, lost its hurricane status, subsiding to a “post-tropical cyclone” after cutting a swath from Florida to South Carolina.
Ruined landscapeMatthew crashed ashore on Haiti’s southern coast on Tuesday as a monster Category 4 storm, packing 145 mile (230 km) winds.
Aerial footage from the hardest-hit towns in southern Haiti showed a ruined landscape of metal shanties with roofs blown away, downed trees everywhere and mud from overflowing rivers covering the ground.
On Sunday, the most powerful Atlantic storm since 2007 unleashed torrential rains and powerful winds as it churned slowly north after pummelling the southeastern coast of the United States, killing at least 11 people in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina since Thursday and leaving more than two million businesses and homes without power.
Nearly 900 deadDamage in the United States, however, was much less than in Haiti, where Matthew took nearly 900 lives. At least 13 people on the Caribbean island have also died from outbreaks of cholera since the storm, and around 61,500 people were in shelters, officials in the country said.
