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JÉ RÉ MIE, Haiti—Nearly a week after Hurricane Matthew slammed into the southwestern tip of Haiti, the scale of destruction is starting to become clear as residents begin to rebuild homes and businesses, and as shortages of food and fresh water threaten to tip some remote areas into humanitarian crisis.

Haiti's president, Jocelerme Privert, and U.S. Ambassador Peter F. Mulrean visited this storm-battered coastal city Saturday to observe the worst devastation the nation has seen since an earthquake in 2010 killed as many as 220,000 people.

The storm last week swept through Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, destroying thousands of homes and acres of croplands, shutting down schools, and delaying a hotly contested presidential election.

The death toll seems likely to rise. Some news reports have tallied more than 800 dead, mainly along the southwestern peninsula, including the cities of Jé ré mie and Les Cayes. More than 60,000 people have been displaced by the storm and are living in temporary shelters, said Jude Saint-Natus, an official with Haiti's Interior Ministry.

The hurricane flattened miles of homes along the coastal road leading into the center of Jé ré mie, a city of 30,000 known to Haitians as the "City of Poets" for its literary heritage.

Within the city was a scene of devastation.

Winds tore the roof off the St. Louis King of France cathedral. On the Rue Stenio Vincent, the main commercial strip, dozens of businesses and sidewalks had been decimated. Tree branches, downed power lines, and pieces of storefronts and roofs lay in piles of mud. The stench of rotting food filled the air.

Simon Paulson, a shop owner who moved to Jé ré mie from Atlanta seven years ago, said he had lost about 200,000 Haitian gourde ($3,100) worth of inventory after seawater surged into his stockrooms. Looters had tried to steal food from his shop about 20 times in three days, he said.

He compared the hurricane with the 2010 earthquake. "It feels like the same thing all over again. It's very discouraging," he said. "This storm was an inferno. This is our Aleppo."

Carmin Magloire, another shop owner on the street, said that he had lost half of his inventory, and that two houses he owns were destroyed. As he spoke, workers sorted through large, sodden bags of macaroni pasta, trying to salvage dry pieces.

Health officials are worried about an increase in cholera cases due to the lack of clean drinking water. In the past six years, around 10,000 Haitians have died from the disease, and there have been about 27,000 cases already this year.

At the St. Antoine Hospital overlooking Jé ré mie, Carlyne Bernard, an official with the local health department, said the hospital had received 38 patients seeking treatment for cholera in the past three days.

Throughout the city, residents zoomed by on motorcycles carrying tanks of drinking water and other supplies, a sign that the population here is beginning to dig out from the damage caused by the hurricane.

A third Boeing 747 cargo plane landed in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, bringing the total amount of nonfood aid supplies to 264 metric tons to help some 1.5 million people affected by the storm, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. About 750,000 people need assistance, according to the United Nations. That includes blankets, plastic sheeting, kitchen sets and hygiene kits.

"Our main concern and our No. 1 focus is getting food and fresh drinking water out to the areas that are cut off, as soon as possible," said Tim Callahan, team leader for USAID's Disaster Assistance Response Team in Haiti. "The issue is how to get supplies in there, and it's really by boat or by helicopter at this point."

Alta Jean Baptiste, executive director of the Department of Civil Protection, said Hurricane Matthew was different from earlier storms because of the combination of flooding and extremely high winds, and the degree to which houses and crops were destroyed, which has left thousands of Haitians at risk of famine.

"In the last 30 years, we've never dealt with such violent winds," Ms. Baptiste said. "We can only supply food for a while, and then in a parallel way, we have to restore agriculture so people are able to grow their crops."

Haiti's Ministry of Agriculture is preparing an effort to provide farming equipment and seeds to replant light winter crops such as carrots, potatoes, beets and cabbage, and over the next few months will do the same for hardier spring crops such as beans, corn and sweet potatoes. "If they fail in that campaign to grow spring crops, it will be a disaster," Ms. Baptiste said.

Lynn Black, a disaster-response specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who sits on the board of the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation, visited Les Anglais, an isolated town of approximately 25,000 at the far western end of the peninsula on Saturday afternoon.

She said the mayor of the town had reported 185 dead, more than 700 injured and at least 25 new cases of cholera, and that the sole local physician, Saintima Fresnel, was down to four bags of intravenous fluid at a local clinic. Residents said no government aid workers had reached the town, and that food supplies were running low because all four bridges leading into the community had been destroyed, Dr. Black said.

"Everyone, including newborn babies, is drinking contaminated water right now," Dr. Black said. "This is truly a humanitarian crisis. And I don't think Les Anglais is a unique community. Every town and commune along the coast is in a similar situation."

Back in Jé ré mie, Maarten Boute, chairman of wireless telephone provider Digicel Haiti, said the company had lost its entire network after the storm in the Grand'Anse Department, which includes Jé ré mie, and it took three days to fully restore service.

"The good news is, the town has picked up again," Mr. Boute said. "People are picking up their lives, rebuilding their roofs, commerce is starting up again."

The Haitian government, especially the president's office and the department of Civil Protection, is taking a larger, more central role in coordinating large donations of humanitarian aid supplies from the U.S., Canada, the European Union and others than it did after the 2010 earthquake, said Yvonne Helle, senior country director for the United Nations Development Program in Haiti.

"There's a whole structure now at the national level, all the way down to the communal level" to coordinate efforts, she said. "It's a huge difference from six years ago. It's light years better."

    Write to Robbie Whelan   at  robbie.whelan@wsj.com 
 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 09, 2016 22:05 ET (02:05 GMT)

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