Dominican Republic left in shambles after Georges passes

As the storm approached, newly appointed Civil Defense Director Elpidio Baez discounted scientific projections that it was likely to rip through the heart of the nation and its capital, Santo Domingo.

Sophisticated computers at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami that were predicting just such a route, Baez said, were just plain wrong. They had misread Georges' course before, he explained.

Forty minutes later, a trembling Baez again appeared on television and gave the location of the government's emergency hurricane shelters for the first time since the storm began bearing down on the island: "I want to tell all the inhabitants of Santo Domingo to immediately evacuate their homes and go to the shelters. ... Take cover."

But for many, it was too late.

Millions of Dominicans - and their government - were sitting ducks for a monstrous storm that wrought such havoc on this already impoverished nation that Dominican President Leonel Fernandez announced Monday night his government must now renegotiate its foreign debt to finance even the basics of life for its 8 million citizens in the months ahead.

A full week after Georges demolished bridges, wiped out entire barrios, ripped apart hotels and decimated crops, nearly 300,000 Dominicans remain homeless. At least 213 people are confirmed dead, and nearly 100 are still missing - most of whom disappeared when the government opened a dam that was about to burst without first evacuating the villages downriver, relief officials said.

It was a disaster, many here say, that was compounded by the government's response to it. Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodriguez, the prelate of this predominantly Catholic nation, spoke for most Dominicans when he indicated to reporters last weekend that the government could - and should - have better prepared its citizens for their worst natural disaster in 20 years.

"I believe that lives can always be saved when precautions are taken," he said. "And, in this case, it would have been preferable, with more time, to take people to shelters, where they could have been properly cared for."

The Dominican toll is the highest in the Caribbean, where a total of 370 deaths - most of the remainder in neighboring Haiti - now are blamed on the storm. By contrast, only five died in Puerto Rico, which was devastated the day before. And just three were killed in Cuba, where authorities evacuated 200,000 people in advance of the storm.

"Today, we are much poorer even than we were before," Dominican economist Felix Calvo concluded in an essay published today. "It is as if a massive napalm attack had leveled the country."

"Now we must discover a new Dominican Republic."

Added Paolo Oberti, the U.N. representative here: "This disaster is definitely going to worsen the situation. The poor will become miserable, and the miserable will become sub-miserable."

Economist Calvo estimated the total cost of the storm at nearly 40 percent of the country's $15 billion gross national product.

The government's damage estimate is much lower: $1.2 billion. But even the official figures testify to the potential long-term impact of the storm. At least 10 percent of the hotel rooms in the republic's vital tourism sector were damaged.

So were most factories and power plants in a country where chronic electricity shortages have triggered strikes and social unrest even before the storm.

In President Fernandez's nationally televised speech Monday night - apparently timed to pre-empt the first inning of the Chicago Cubs' playoff game featuring Dominican national hero Sammy Sosa - he unveiled plans to raise $650 million to rebuild the country.

Much of the money, he said, will be diverted from the government's foreign debt repayments after it reschedules them. Tens of millions more will be deducted from the paychecks of the government's highest-paid civil servants - officials who earn $12,000 a year or more. And Fernandez said still more will come from foreign aid.

A delegation of U.S. Cabinet officials and legislators is scheduled to arrive today to assess those longer-term needs.

Another U.S. congressional group here last Sunday indicated Congress may appropriate as much as $30 million for Dominican relief in its upcoming budget.

Already, however, the U.S. government has mobilized emergency relief efforts here. Coordinated by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington has sent medicine, food, water and plastic roofing, along with search-and-rescue teams.

"If the Dominican government spends the emergency funds rationally, appropriately and efficiently, I think they can get through the crisis fairly quickly," said Anibal de Castro, a social analyst and publisher of the Dominican weekly magazine Rumbo.

The cover of Rumbo, which hits the streets Wednesday, declares: "The Cost of Shortsightedness." It uses transcripts of Baez's televised appearances the day of the storm and reports from emergency management meetings in the days before to detail government mistakes, misjudgments and misplaced priorities.

"The political cost of this disaster to the government," de Castro said Tuesday, "will be very, very high."

(Optional add end)

According to several accounts published here in recent days, civil defense chief Baez - a former journalist and ruling party spokesman - also had ordered deletions from official weather advisories that would have warned the nation of the devastation to come. He reportedly labeled as "alarmists" Dominican meteorologists who predicted the storm's grave potential, arguing that such warnings would hurt the country's tourism industry.

Baez could not be reached for comment this week. But in interviews with the Dominican media after the storm, he justified his reluctance to give the location of the hurricane shelters by citing the nation's chronic problem of poor families who invade and occupy public property. Announcing the locations, he said, would have been an open invitation to squatters, who would refuse to leave if the storm passed by the island.

NewsCom 09/29/98 04:25:25 PM

09-30-98