Haiti Exodus Feared
The U.S. Coast Guard helicopter swooped down to a dangerous nighttime landing on a deserted Bahamian island and found 288 shipwrecked Haitians, many weakened or unconscious from exposure and dehydration.
The survivors, discovered Wednesday night and all brought to safety by Friday, were from the biggest group of Haitian boat people to reach the Bahamas in years.
Rescuers found two bodies, and survivors said 12 others either drowned or died of dehydration during the trip, U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Gibran Soto said Friday. Sixty-five survivors were taken to hospital suffering from dehydration, hypothermia and kidney failure.
The shipwreck highlighted fears that the Bahamas and the United States could face a new flood of Haitians headed for their shores.
Aside from the group discovered at Flamingo Cay, another 122 Haitians landed Wednesday on Inagua, the southernmost Bahamian island just 100 miles from Haiti's north coast. On April 21, 224 Haitians arrived.
The new arrivals may just be a usual increase during the Easter season, when migrants believe there will be fewer Coast Guard patrols, Bahamian immigration director Vernon Burrows said.
Still, "there is major concern as to whether or not there is going to be some mass exodus of persons out of Haiti into the Bahamas or the United States during the next few months," Burrows told The Associated Press.
There are no figures, but officials estimate there are as many as 40,000 Haitians living among the 300,000 Bahamians. Last year, 4,001 Haitian migrants were arrested in the Bahamas. In this year's four months, 2,500 have been detained.
Survivors of the latest journey said at least eight people drowned when their overcrowded homemade sloop crashed into rocks off Flamingo Cay in the Ragged Island chain in the southern Bahamas, about 250 miles northwest of Haiti. Another six died there of dehydration, they told officials.
On Friday, 223 of the survivors were on a Bahamian Defense Force vessel headed for the capital Nassau. They will be questioned, then deported. Sixty-five others were in hospitals.
It wasn't known how long the Haitians were stranded on the tiny cay, with no water, food or protection from glaring sunlight.
Peter Barry, a Port St. Lucie, Fla., doctor on a pleasure boat called Tango, spotted them Wednesday night, called for help and landed to treat survivors. The first helicopter arrived about an hour-and-a-half after his call.
"It was a tough landing at night," Coast Guard spokesman John Gaffney. The pilot landed "with wheels only feet from the water on a beach with a big slope and with the shoreline rising up and brush and rock on the other side so that they had to be very careful about not striking rotors."
Two helicopters and a C-130 aircraft, all from Clearwater, Fla., ran dozens of flights to ferry out those in need of medical treatment and bring in supplies for those who had o wait.
Two Coast Guard cutters and a Bahamian Defense Force ship arrived with more medical help.
Since there were too many people to fit on the cutters, rescuers erected a shelter from the sun using blankets, tarpaulins and ropes.
"Most of them were lying under the shelter, lethargic, some of them sleeping, a number were unalert and unresponsive, maybe semiconscious," Gaffney said.
The dramatic increase in the number of Haitians seeking refuge in the Bahamas coincides with increasing violence in Haiti as the nation gears up for long-postponed legislative elections.
But the director of Haiti's National Migration Office, Carol Joseph, said he did not believe politics had a hand in the emigration.
"It's a sign of economic despair," he said Thursday, noting that it takes months to prepare such voyages and that most migrants were subsistence farmers from Haiti's northwest, not the capital where most of the political violence has been occurring.
By JESSICA ROBERTSON