11 October 1954 · Haitian
Hurricane Hazel takes forty percent of Haiti's coffee bushes
›Read the full entryClose
Hazel came up from the south on 11 October 1954 with winds of eighty knots. It struck the coast at Port-a-Piment, tore past Les Cayes, wrecked most of Jeremie, flattened villages, killed at least a thousand people, stripped forty percent of the country's coffee bushes, destroyed the new banana plantations Magloire had sponsored and uprooted half the cacao trees. Nan Mapou, a well off village near Port-a-Piment, was left as a lagoon a mile long. Help arrived fast. The Saipan was off the coast within a day, and money came from the Red Cross, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, Ghana, Guadeloupe and the United States, whose grants eventually reached nearly five million dollars. Some of it reached the people it was sent for. Visitors to the back country found relief stores stacked in army depots, prefectures and private shops for years afterwards. The word entered Creole with a second meaning. Mink wraps on the wives of officials were known as les Hazels.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.