Authorities in Haiti today urged hundreds of thousands of homeless earthquake survivors to seek safer shelter as a powerful tropical storm threatened to inflict further misery on the western hemisphere's poorest country.
As the skies darkened over the capital, Port-au-Prince, and tarpaulin tents began flapping in the wind, a policeman at the Corail-Cesselesse camp shouted through a megaphone: "The hurricane is not a joke ... you need to get out of here."
Tropical storm Tomas is expected to hit the island tomorrow, unleashing torrential rains and a storm surge of up to 9ft (3 metres) that will put 1.5 million people at risk, relief officials said.
The impending storm has already spread tension through many of the camps housing people made homeless by January's quake.
Scuffles broke out yesterday when managers tried to explain a planned voluntary evacuation of nearly 8,000 people from tents that were supposed to be hurricane-resistant.
"People said: 'We've been displaced before. What's going to happen to us? Are we going to be able to get back?'" Bryant Castro, an American Refugee Committee official, told the Associated Press.
"The tension is elevated. People are really concerned about their belongings. They're posing a lot of legitimate questions."
As news of the storm's predicted trajectory slowly filtered through Port-au-Prince via wind-up radios and megaphone announcements, unease set in among people who have lost homes and relatives in the quake and saw tents ripped apart in lesser storms this year.
"We are using radio stations to announce to people that if they don't have a place to go, but they have friends and families, they should move into a place that is secure," Nadia Lochard, a civil protection official, said.
The storm hit Barbados, St Lucia – where at least 14 people died – and St Vincent and the Grenadines last weekend, causing millions of pounds of damage.
Relief groups, already at full stretch as they seek to contain a cholera outbreak, are scrambling to ensure that adequate emergency supplies are in place for the storm.
"Unicef staff have been working with our partners around the clock to help address and contain the cholera outbreak," Francoise Gruloos-Ackermans, the Unicef representative in Haiti, said. "The potential landfall of this tropical storm endangers the work completed to date, and poses a new threat of the waterborne cholera disease being spread by inland flooding."
The outbreak of cholera, which has taken 442 lives and hospitalised 6,700 people, has triggered another national emergency in Haiti.
The storm comes as Haiti, a deforested and mountainous land vulnerable to flash floods and mudslides, isrecovering from an earthquake that killed more than a quarter of a million people and left about 1.3m survivors still living in fragile outdoor camps.
Tomas hit the Caribbean's eastern islands as a hurricane four days ago before weakening. It is gathering force again and could hit Haiti and Jamaica soon, forecasters said.
In Jamaica, which is still struggling to recuperate from floods unleashed by storms that killed at least 13 people in September, authorities were preparing shelters and urging people to evacuate from low-lying, flood-prone areas.
Haiti faces major disruption less than a month before presidential and legislative elections take place on 28 November. Electoral officials have not moved to postpone the vote.