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14 December, 2007 - Published 20:14 GMT
The United Nations has made an urgent appeal for US$4m to help the thousands of victims of Tropical Storm Olga in the Caribbean.
In the hardest hit nation the Dominican Republic, 37,000 people were forced to flee their homes by the rare December storm on Tuesday (11 Dec 2007) night and are staying in shelters.
Officials in the Dominican Republic said Olga damaged 7,500 houses, mainly in the country’s second largest city Santiago.
The UN’s World Food Programme’s Latin America spokesman Trevor Rowe told BBC Caribbean the money was needed for food and rebuilding damaged homes.
“These people have had to abandon their homes and at the same time they are going to have re-build their lives."
“While the number does not seem large on a global scale, proportionately this is a significant amount of the population of this tiny country,” he said.
The death toll from Olga continues to rise, 11 more people were confirmed dead taking the total number of those killed to 28.
Many of the dead in the Dominican Republic drowned when a river burst its banks and flooded part of Santiago.
Survivors blamed authorities for not warning that the floodgates of the Travera Dam would be opened during the storm unleashing a deadly wall of water that killed as many as 20 people.
Failure
The country’s main opposition Dominica Revolutionary Party told BBC Caribbean the government’s response to the storm was slow and this led to a failure in following the correct procedure for emptying the dam.
“The manual states that in the first 48 hours previous to the storm, you should have eliminated at least between 500 and 800 cubic metres of water per second and that was not done."
“Apparently the government was thinking that the storm was not coming or that the amount of water was not sufficient enough to release the amount that the operational manual states,” he said.
Olga was only the 10th named storm to develop in the month of December (2007) since record keeping began in 1851, the US National Hurricane Center said.
This weekend rescue workers will continue trying to deal with the after affects of Olga which killed 3 more people in Haiti and Puerto Rico.