PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Nearly 250 people have died in massive floods that raged across northern Haiti after Tropical Storm Jeanne hit this crushingly poor Caribbean nation over the weekend, a UN spokesman said.
The death toll was based only on the bodies counted early Monday at the public hospital in the northern city of Gonaives, and the total number could still rise as local officials in other parts of the country grapple with the enormity of the floods.
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) resumed its emergency helicopter flights carrying food and medicine to Gonaives, the mission's spokesman Toussaint Kongo-Doudou told AFP.
"All humanitarian agencies have mobilized to assist in the devastated regions," including medical teams dispatched by the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders, he said.
One tonne of medicine will be airlifted to Gonaives, while the UN's World Food Program will send convoys of food and water to the city about 110 kilometers (70 miles) north of the capital, Kongo-Doudou said.
Haitian authorities have declared the entire flood zone a disaster area, after Jeanne drenched the island of Hispaniola on Friday and Saturday, leaving 80 percent of Gonaives under water.
Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who declared three days of national mourning, flew over a flooded area by helicopter on Sunday. He described the area as a "vast sea."
"There is not one house in the city of Gonaives that is not flooded," Latortue said, adding that 80 percent of the population there, or 80,000 people, needs food.
MINUSTAH flights Sunday could not find the Island of La Tortue, home to 26,000 people, which might be completely submerged. The prime minister said he would provide more information on the island later.
In neighboring Dominican Republic, at least seven deaths were blamed on Jeanne.
Storms in May left at least 1,500 dead when floods swept through the border area between the two countries.
Jeanne -- currently churning over the Caribbean north of the Bahamas and expected to stay out to sea for the next few days -- was just the latest in a string of deadly storms to slam the Americas.
Hurricane Ivan, responsible for more than 100 deaths in the United States and Caribbean, finally petered out over the weekend but countries in the region were still reeling from the destruction left in its wake.
Thousands of homes were flattened by the third major hurricane to hit the southern United States in six weeks.
Insurance experts have estimated the cost at up to 10 billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive in US history.
US President George W. Bush has declared Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina disaster areas because of the damage left by Ivan, and declared another disaster in Puerto Rico because of Jeanne.
Bush visited the hardest-hit parts of Alabama and Florida on Sunday, promising government aid to help rebuild.
His trip to Pensacola, Florida marked his third visit in six weeks to tour parts of the state hit by hurricanes, after Charley and Frances also ripped through.
Ivan first menaced the Caribbean island of Tobago on September 7 before pounding Grenada, Barbados, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands, leaving 70 dead.
Grenada alone suffered 37 deaths when Ivan pummeled it September 8.
Thursday, the monster storm slammed into the US Gulf Coast, packing winds of up to 215 kilometers per hour (135 miles an hour), wrecking houses and buildings and causing widespread flooding.
Ivan spawned tornadoes and left floods in its wake, killing at least 38 people across a massive swath of the country from Louisiana on the Gulf Coast to Maryland, a small mid-Atlantic state adjacent to the US capital, to Connecticut, north of New York.