PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- It was the jewel of Haiti's post-earthquake recovery: an organized relocation camp with thousands of tents billed as hurricane-resistant, lined up in neat rows on graded mountain soil.
Now, staring down an expected hit later this week from a hurricane, officials say Corail-Cesselesse is not safe. On Tuesday, the government advised the estimated 7,850 residents of its primary relocation camp to ride out the storm somewhere else.
"We're asking people in Corail to voluntarily move from where they are and go to the houses of family or friends. The places the government has identified are churches and schools that are available for shelter from the storm," Haiti civil protection official Abel Nazaire told The Associated Press.
Camp managers held a "loudspeaker meeting" with megaphones to tell residents about the evacuation order, said Bryant Castro, the American Refugee Committee staffer managing the camp. Residents were told to seek any home they could find and are expected to start leaving as soon as Wednesday.
A hurricane over the weekend, Tomas weakened to a tropical depression early Wednesday with maximum sustained winds near 35 mph.
"This short-term trend is sort of baffling at this point," said Dave Roberts, hurricane specialist at National Hurricane Center in ort-au-Prince, Les Cayes, Gonaives and Cap-Haitien. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said rainfall of up to 5 inches could cause catastrophic floods in the severely deforested country.
Aid workers are scrambling to prepare but are badly short of supplies including shelter material because of the responses already under way to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake and an unprecedented cholera outbreak that has killed more than 330 people and hospitalized more than 4,700.
A U.S. Navy vessel, the amphibious warship Iwo Jima, was steaming toward Haiti on Tuesday to provide disaster relief.
Some of the biggest concern is for 1.3 million earthquake survivors still living under tarps and tents nearly 10 months after the disaster. The government said there are some shelters in the capital -- a handful have been built in nearby Leogane and several hours north in Gonaives -- but basically people will be on their own if Tomas hits.
"The government doesn't have shelters for 1,300,000 people," Nazaire said.
An enormous international aid effort flowed into Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake, but reconstruction has barely begun, in part because donors have not come through with promised funds. The United States has not provided any of the $1.15 billion in reconstruction aid it pledged last March.
When Corail opened in April, it was portrayed as a model for how camps could be built and run. A joint effort by the Haitian government and international aid groups, including U.N. peacekeepers and U.S. military engineers, it was billed as a refuge from dangerous ' she said.
"We knew a hurricane was going to come -- this is Haiti, this always happens -- and we have not had a level of reconstruction that gets people under tents into houses."
At this point there is little to be done before the storm. Romelus said his family -- his wife, two daughters ages 2 and 5, a sister and nephews -- will stay in the camp unless the government can provide shelter. They have nowhere else to go.
"God will protect me. I'm not going to be the only one (staying Corail). If something happens, we'll deal with it," he said. "If they could have moved more quickly and built more houses, it would have been safer."
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