On this day in 2004, rain from Hurricane Jeanne came down on northern Haiti. The storm's centre stayed offshore, north of Hispaniola; what reached the land was water. It fell on hillsides above Gonaïves that had long since lost most of their trees, and bare slopes hold almost nothing. The runoff gathered into the streambeds and arrived in the city in minutes rather than hours, carrying mud with it. Gonaïves took the worst of it. Port-de-Paix and other towns of the north and the Artibonite flooded too.
About 3,006 people were killed. Many thousands more lost their homes, their water, their animals and their fields in a single night.
The satellite image below shows Jeanne days later, a wide spiral with a clear eye, well away from Haiti. Nothing in that picture explains what happened at Gonaïves. That was decided on the ground, on slopes that could no longer do the work of holding rain. The counting afterwards was done by local officials, aid workers and neighbours going house to house.
In the weeks after the flood in Gonaives, much of the feeding was done in shared pots — rice and beans cooked over charcoal for whole streets at a time, because clean water and fuel were easier to gather once than a hundred times. Neighbours cooked for neighbours while the mud was still in the houses.
In the week after a flood the greatest danger is usually the water itself: floodwater mixes with sewage, and wells and standpipes are contaminated long after the level drops. Safe drinking water and oral rehydration salts save more lives in those days than almost anything else, which is why the first supplies in are so often chlorine, jerrycans and simple filters.