At Least 100 Killed in Dominican Flood

Floods unleashed by torrential rains swept through a Dominican Republic farming town, killing about 100 people and leaving scores missing, officials said Monday.

Bodies caked with mud were piled in a hospital’s makeshift morgue in the western town of Jimani, near the Haitian border. The regular morgue was destroyed by the flood.

Officials said about 150 people were missing since a river flooded a neighborhood early Monday. Only mud with hunks of lumber sticking out and a trail of clothes remained where dozens of houses once stood.

After darkness fell, rescue workers suspended their search for the missing until today.

A local volunteer group, Citizens Taking Part, estimated that 200 people had died, but the official toll had not reached that point. At least 34 of the dead were children.

Amid the chaos, townspeople looking for loved ones wandered streets littered with fallen trees and power poles.

“They found my daughter. Now I have to see if I have some family left,” said Elena Diaz, 42, sobbing in a long line outside the morgue where she went to look for her son-in-law and three grandchildren.

She said her daughter’s house was swept away by a raging river.

The flood-ravaged area is one of the poorest in the Dominican Republic, a country of 8.5 million people that shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. The sudden, powerful flooding occurred after almost continuous rain for the last two weeks.

A police spokesman, Col. Ramon Francisco Rodriguez Sanchez, said President Hipolito Mejia had sent a team of doctors and rescue workers to the area, along with food, medicine and other supplies.

Emergency workers dug bodies from the mud all day. The remains of some people were laid along the main road as ambulances lined up to retrieve them.

Farmer Jose Altagracia Perez said he was in his house about 3 a.m. Monday when the water began to rise, leaving little time for action. He was in line outside the morgue, looking for his 3-year-old son.

“The house is all gone,” he said. “The river came and took everything.”