The news of Hurricane Sandy and the destruction that it laid on the shores of South New Jersey, what hasn’t been reported is the damage done to Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba. There were few boots on the ground from the western media to cover the effects on these Caribbean countries.
A report posted by the Guardian, a London based newspaper is that, when it became clear that the New York region would bear the full force of Sandy, the news media deployed their own massive force to cover every movement of the story. The networks and local television stations battled to show which reporter was bravest as they fed us live feeds of journalists standing in the middle of the hurricane.
The resilience and heroism of average people were the narrative the day after the storm. The dead were rightly given a face and their lives memorialized.
But what we didn’t see were reports out of places like Haiti, a country that has seen more natural disasters than the richest countries would be able to handle adequately, let alone one of the poorest nations on Earth. Hurricane Sandy drenched the country’s south with more than 20 inches of rainfall. As the rivers receded, allowing officials to travel through the storm-drenched southern peninsula, the death toll rose to 52.
Damage was done also to Cuba where 200,000 homes were ruined.
In the Bahamas, the total cost of damage to private property and public infrastructure is expected to reach $300m, according to a report from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. That total would be higher than last year’s Hurricane Irene, which caused about $250m in damage to the island chain east of Florida.
In Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, the hurricane did more than just destroy houses. The hurricane flooded Les Cayes, the third largest city in Haiti, and has exacerbated a Cholera epidemic that has been difficult for the Haitian government to control.
Read more about this story here Hurricane Sandy Hits The Carribean
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