COTEAUX, Haiti — It’s been nearly a month since Hurricane Matthew tore through southern Haiti and people like Kettley Rosier and many of her neighbors still have to spend their meager savings for water to drink.
Wells and piped networks that people depend on for clean water across the country’s southern peninsula were contaminated or damaged by a combination of ocean storm surge and sewage from the overflowing latrines that are commonly used in rural Haiti. Tainted well water and rivers throughout the region also carry cholera bacteria, which epidemiologists suspect has sickened thousands of people since the Category 4 hurricane.
That means there is just not enough clean water to drink, let alone bathe, in places like the town of Coteaux, adding to the misery in an area where many people lost their homes, as well as the crops and livestock they need to survive.
“We’re tired of this,” Rosier said on a recent morning, scratching at skin irritated after bathing in suspect well water. For drinking water, she has to buy small bags from street vendors. “God only knows when the good water will come back.”
An army of international relief teams have put enormous work into cleaning contaminated wells, distributing millions of water-purifying tablets and installing water treatment stations in areas that bore the worst of the hurricane. But it’s not yet enough.
Roughly 90 percent of the piped water supply systems in southwest Haiti were damaged by the storm that struck Oct. 4, according to Haiti’s National Water and Sanitation Directorate. Communal and private wells were contaminated across three provinces.
The extensive contamination of wells and the large amount of rain dumped by Hurricane Matthew created ideal conditions for spreading waterborne diseases including cholera, which causes rapid dehydration and can kill a human within hours if not treated. Authorities and aid groups say they have also detected fecal matter and E. coli bacteria in drinking supplies.
“A lot of sources are contaminated at the moment,” said Leo Tremblay, a Canadian water and sanitation coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, which is overseeing a cholera treatment center in the village of Port-a-Piment and has sent staff by donkey to provide aid to remote mountain villages.
In the devastated city of Jeremie, two water purification stations operated by French government emergency workers have so far transformed river water into 450,000 liters of potable water. But international specialists say many communities right along shorelines still aren’t getting adequate supplies.
Complicating matters, some storm victims are taking chances with their health.
In parts of the city of Les Cayes, people could be seen drinking straight from a contaminated well, bypassing treated supplies set up by a South Carolina-based organization known as Water Mission.
“Our bodies are used to dirty water. Maybe if we go to that new water place we’ll fall sick,” said Ephraim Bernard, a jobless 24-year-old standing by the contaminated well, located by a trash pit where three people were openly defecating on a recent morning.
Cholera was likely introduced to Haiti in 2010 by U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal.