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U.S. government charter flight to evacuate Americans from Haiti, as hunger soars: “There are a lot of desperate people”
The U.S. government said on Saturday that it is arranging a charter flight from Haiti to the U.S. for those with valid passports.
The flight will leave from the Cap-Haitien International Airport, which can only accommodate limited travel amid violence in the country. The State Department instructed citizens and eligible family members interested in traveling to the U.S. to fill out an intake form.
Officials warned that the trip from Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital, to Cap-Haitien is “dangerous” and recommended that people consider the flight “only if you believe you can reach Cap-Haitien airport safely.” The government cannot currently provide overland transport to the airport, the State Department said, but is working “on options for departures out of Port-au-Prince.” The airport and the capital city are about 120 miles apart.
The country has been overwhelmed by violent gangs that some experts say have unleashed a low-scale civil war. Some 1.4 million Haitians are on the verge of famine, and more than 4 million require food aid, sometimes eating only once a day or nothing at all, aid groups say.
“Haiti is facing a protractive and mass hunger,” Jean-Martin Bauer, Haiti director for the United Nation’s World Food Program, told The Associated Press. He noted that Croix-des-Bouquets, in the eastern part of Haiti’s capital, “has malnutrition rates comparable with any war zone in the world.”
Gangs block aid
Officials are trying to rush food, water and medical supplies to makeshift shelters and other places as gang violence suffocates lives across Port-au-Prince and beyond, with many trapped in their homes.
Only a few aid organizations have been able to restart since Feb. 29, when gangs began attacking key institutions, burning police stations, shutting down the main international airport with gunfire and storming two prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.
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The violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce early Tuesday that he would resign once a transitional council is created, but gangs demanding his ouster have continued their attacks in several communities.
Bauer and other officials said that the gangs are blocking distribution routes and paralyzing the main port, and that the World Food Program’s warehouse is running out of grains, beans and vegetable oil as it continues to deliver meals.
“We have supplies for weeks. I’m saying weeks, not months,” Bauer said. “That has me terrified.”
Inside the makeshift shelter at the school, things were a bit more orderly, with scores of people standing in line for food. More than 3,700 shelter residents compete for a place to sleep and share a hole in the ground for a toilet.
Erigeunes Jeffrand, 54, said he used to make a living selling up to four wheelbarrow-loads of sugar cane a day, but that gangs recently chased him and his four children out of their neighborhood.
“My home was completely destroyed and robbed,” he said. “They took everything I have. And now, they’re not even letting me work.”
He sent his two youngest children to live with relatives in Haiti’s more quiet countryside while the two eldest live with him at the shelter.
“Can you believe I had a home?” he said. “I was making ends meet. But now, I’m just depending on what people provide me to eat. This is not a life.”
Guerinault Louis/Anadolu via Getty Images
More than 200 gangs are believed to operate in Haiti, with nearly two dozen concentrated in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. They now control 80% of the capital and are vying for more territory.
Scores of people have died in the most recent attacks, and more than 15,000 have been left homeless.
“There are a lot of desperate people”
Marie Lourdes Geneus, a 45-year-old street vendor and mother of seven children, said gangs chased her family out of three different homes before they ended up at the shelter.
“If you look around, there are a lot of desperate people who look like me, who had a life and lost it,” she said. “It’s a horrible life I’m living. I made a lot of effort in life and look where I end up, trying to survive.”
Guerinault Louis/Anadolu via Getty Images
She said she occasionally ventures out to sell beans to buy extra food for her children – who sometimes eat only once a day – but ends up being chased by armed men, spilling her goods on the ground as she runs.
The situation has prevented aid groups like Food for the Hungry from operating at a time when their help is needed the most.
“We’re stuck, with no cash and no capacity to move out what we have in our warehouse,” said Boby Sander, the organization’s Haiti director. “It’s catastrophic.”
Food for the Hungry operates a cash-based program that helps some 25,000 families a year by sending them money, but he said the ongoing looting and attacks on banks have crippled the system. “Since Feb. 29, we have not been able to do anything at all,” he said.
On a recent morning, the fragrance of cooking rice drew a group of adults and teenage boys to a sidewalk near a building where aid workers prepared meals to distribute to shelters elsewhere in the city.
“Can you help me get a plate of food? We haven’t had anything to eat today yet,” they asked people going in and out of the building. But their pleas went unanswered. The food was destined for the shelter at the school.
“We know it’s not a lot,” said Jean Emmanuel Joseph, who oversees food distribution for the Center for Peasant Organization and Community Action. “It’s too bad we don’t have the possibility to give them more.”
Guerinault Louis/Anadolu via Getty Images
At the shelter, some adults and children tried to get back in line for a second serving. “You already had a plate,” they were told. “Let others get one.”
Shelter resident Jethro Antoine, 55, said the food is meant only for residents, but there’s little that can be done about outsiders who squeeze in. “If you go and complain about it, you’re going to become the enemy, you might even be killed for that,” he said.
USAID said some 5.5 million people in Haiti – nearly half the population – need humanitarian aid, and pledged $25 million in addition to the $33 million announced earlier this week.
Bauer, with the U.N., said the humanitarian appeal for Haiti this year is less than 3% funded, with the World Food Program needing $95 million in the next six months.
“Conflict and hunger in Haiti are moving hand-in-hand,” he said. “I’m frightened about where we’re going.”
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A long-running heat wave that has already shattered previous records across the U.S. persisted on Sunday, baking parts of the West with dangerous temperatures that caused the death of a motorcyclist in Death Valley and held the East in its hot and humid grip.
An excessive heat warning — the National Weather Service’s highest alert — was in effect for about 36 million people, or about 10% of the population, said NWS meteorologist Bryan Jackson. Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records.
Many areas in Northern California surpassed 110 degrees, with the city of Redding topping out at a record 119. Phoenix set a new daily record Sunday for the warmest low temperature: it never got below 92 F.
A high temperature of 128 F was recorded Saturday and Sunday at Death Valley National Park in eastern California, where a visitor died Saturday from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized, officials said.
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The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area amid scorching weather, the park said in a statement.
The person who died was not identified. The other motorcyclist was transported to a Las Vegas hospital for “severe heat illness,” the statement said. Due to the high temperatures, emergency medical helicopters were unable to respond, as the aircraft cannot generally fly safely over 120 F, officials said.
The other four members of the party were treated at the scene.
“While this is a very exciting time to experience potential world record-setting temperatures in Death Valley, we encourage visitors to choose their activities carefully, avoiding prolonged periods of time outside of an air-conditioned vehicle or building when temperatures are this high,” said park Superintendent Mike Reynolds.
Officials warned that heat illness and injury are cumulative and can build over the course of a day or days.
“Besides not being able to cool down while riding due to high ambient air temperatures, experiencing Death Valley by motorcycle when it is this hot is further challenged by the necessary heavy safety gear worn to reduce injuries during an accident,” the park statement said.
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The soaring temperatures didn’t faze Chris Kinsel, a Death Valley visitor who said it was “like Christmas day for me” to be there on a record-breaking day. Kinsel said he and his wife typically come to the park during the winter, when it’s still plenty warm — but that’s nothing compared with being at one of the hottest places on Earth in July.
“Death Valley during the summer has always been a bucket list thing for me. For most of my life, I’ve wanted to come out here in summertime,” said Kinsel, who was visiting Death Valley’s Badwater Basin area from Las Vegas.
Kinsel said he planned to go to the park’s visitor center to have his photo taken next to the digital sign displaying the current temperature.
Across the desert in Nevada, Natasha Ivory took four of her eight children to a water park in Mount Charleston, outside Las Vegas, which on Sunday set a record high of 120 F.
“They’re having a ball,” Ivory told Fox5 Vegas said. “I’m going to get wet too. It’s too hot not to.”
Jill Workman Anderson also was at Mount Charleston, taking her dog for a short hike and enjoying the view.
“We can look out and see the desert,” she said. “It was also 30 degrees cooler than northwest Las Vegas, where we live.”
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Triple-digit temperatures were common across Oregon, where several records were toppled — including in Salem, where on Sunday it hit 103 F, topping the 99 F mark set in 1960. On the more humid East Coast, temperatures above 100 degrees were widespread, though no excessive heat advisories were in effect for Sunday.
“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors,” read a weather service advisory for the Baltimore area. “Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances.”
Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, with the weather service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains.”
“How hot are we talking? Well, high temperatures across (western Nevada and northeastern California) won’t get below 100 degrees until next weekend,” the service posted online. “And unfortunately, there won’t be much relief overnight either.”
More extreme highs are in the near forecast, including possibly 130 F around midweek at Furnace Creek, California, in Death Valley. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 F in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130 F, recorded there in July 2021.
Tracy Housley, a native of Manchester, England, said she decided to drive from her hotel in Las Vegas to Death Valley after hearing on the radio that temperatures could approach record levels.
“We just thought, let’s be there for that,” Housley said Sunday. “Let’s go for the experience.”
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, there have been at least 13 confirmed heat-related deaths this year, along with more than 160 other deaths suspected of being related to heat that are still under investigation, according to a recent report.
That does not include the death of a 10-year-old boy last week in Phoenix who suffered a “heat-related medical event” while hiking with family at South Mountain Park and Preserve, according to police.
In California, crews worked in sweltering conditions to battle a series of wildfires across the state.
In Santa Barbara County, northwest of Los Angeles, the growing Lake Fire had scorched more than 25 square miles of dry grass, brush and timber after breaking out Friday. There was no containment by Sunday. The blaze was burning through mostly uninhabited wildland, but some rural homes were under evacuation orders.
