Workers prepare an area where small planes evacuated from a nearby airport are being secured in a safer location, in preparation for Tropical Storm Gustav, in George Town, Grand Cayman, yesterday. - AP
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP)
Marcelina Feliz was clutching her 11-month-old baby and shouting for help when the earth shifted above their shack, then came tumbling down.
In a flash, eight lives were gone. Feliz and six of her seven children were buried in mud. Their neighbour also died, in the worst single disaster yet caused by Hurricane Gustav, which killed 23 people before moving on to lash Jamaica on Thursday.
"I don't know how I can go on, because I don't have any family left," wailed Marino Borges, Feliz's husband and the father of several of the dead children.
He was away at work when the cliff fell on to their tin-roof home in Guachupita, an impoverished neighbourhood just north of Santo Domingo. The family had just returned from a shelter where they took refuge from Tropical Storm Fay this month, authorities said.
When rescuers dug through the dirt, they found the body of the 32-year-old mother still holding her dead baby. The family had been unable to escape their home because a locked security gate blocked the front door, Listin Diario, a local daily, reported Thursday.
Hours after Wednesday's pre-dawn landslide, the victims were laid to rest. The local funeral home's only small casket went to the baby. Some of the children seemed tiny inside caskets meant for older people.
Attend the burial
Relatives and friends piled into motorcycles and crammed into buses to attend the burial, which was held so hastily that additional workers and shovels were called in to dig bigger holes to make the coffins fit.
As more people arrived, some climbed atop other tombs for a better view. Two men yelped as they fell through an old tomb that had cracked under their weight.
Some residents demanded Thursday that the government build sturdier new homes in Guachupita.
"This here is going to crumble completely," said Thelma Acosta Feliz. "I don't know want to build here again."
Melvin McGuire, Brad Sapia and Wayne Brown send sheets of plywood up to Jeff St Amant while boarding up windows at a French Quarter building in New Orleans, yesterday, as Hurricane Gustav enters the Gulf of Mexico. - AP
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