"Rain has hit hard here": Floods batter the south of the Dominican Republic

Puddles of water, mud, and debris cover the unpaved streets of a marginalized neighborhood in Barahona, one of the four provinces in the Dominican Republic most affected by Hurricane Melissa when it was still a tropical storm. The powerful hurricane made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday as it began to downgrade from category 5 to 4 and now approaches Cuba, but it continues to wreak havoc in Dominican territory, where the unrelenting rains have left one person dead and another missing. The cloud field surrounding it brings the risk of further flooding and landslides.

"The rain has hit hard here. Very hard. Every time it rains, this neighborhood floods from all sides," Mario Cuevas told AFP in the Don Bosco sector of Barahona, a rural and agricultural region. Barahona is full of banana and coffee plantations but is also a mining province: it is the source of larimar, a unique turquoise blue semiprecious stone found only in the Dominican Republic.

"Every time it rains, the ground breaks more. If it keeps raining, it's going to fall to pieces," added a worried Cuevas, 28, who lives in a rudimentary house built with wooden planks and sticks. He asserts that "with two more days of rain, the planks will be washed away." "They are no good." The roof is also in poor condition; it is made of zinc and has holes. The intense rains have him "surviving," he laments.

Over the weekend, the Dominican government stated that 1.4 million people were left without water, although to date only 250,000 remain without supply. It also reported 3,700 displaced and evacuated people in this country of just over 11 million inhabitants.

• "A chaos" 

Due to the flooding, many communities were supplied with food sent by drones, and although the emergency level has decreased in many areas, the province of Bahoruco and the border provinces with Haiti, Pedernales and Independencia, remain under alert. Some streets in Barahona, in fact, remain waterlogged.

In this area, "in these last few days, it has been very flooded. The fields are collapsing, the neighborhoods are in need," commented Maris Gómez, 53, while walking down a street still full of water. It has been, she added, "a difficult situation. A chaos. A chaos."

The Dominican Republic's Emergency Operations Center (COE) warned that the "rains will continue to cause flash flooding due to the high saturation of the soils, especially in vulnerable zones."

Residents are trying to shield themselves with zinc, though they also ask for divine protection. On Tuesday, a carpenter was placing zinc sheets on the wooden roof of Carlos Pineda's house, who sent to reinforce his roof as a preventive measure against the new rains.

"Water was coming in and we decided to change it," said Pineda, 32. "We are worried because we don't know how we are going to get through this... We are here for whatever God says," he added.