Haiti is anticipating the effects of a major hurricane, and according to CBN News, residents are “preparing for the worst and praying for the best.”
Hurricane Matthew made landfall on the impoverished island earlier this morning, according to USAToday.com, but the scale of the damage is yet to be seen.
Already torrential rains are drenching the island and residents are doing what they can to prepare.
"As we know, we're not really prepared for this type of hurricane," one resident said. "But we're doing the best that we can."
Love Pun, the operations manager at the Be Like Brit Orphanage, said workers have been busy boarding up windows and moving children to the second floor.
Matthew is currently a category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds of 145 mph.
"We’re expecting a lot of houses to go down because of the poor housing infrastructure in a lot of the rural areas where we work," said John Hasse, an aid worker in Haiti with the humanitarian organization World Vision. "With wind this strong, it will be extremely damaging and dangerous and homes for the average person are made of mud and sticks or poorly constructed cinderblocks.”
Not only are strong winds and torrential rains a factor, but disease is likely to be rampant with the influx of water.
To prevent disease, residents are using chlorine as a disinfectant. Operation Blessings’s Bill Horan stated, "So what we started doing five years ago is manufacturing chlorine, chlorine that we typically use to disinfect drinking water. But in times like this we will be using it for surface disinfection."
Matthew is expected to make its track toward Cuba and then up the southeastern coast of the United States into this weekend. The governors of Florida and North Carolina have already declared states of emergency.
Disaster relief efforts are already at work. Samaritan's Purse, led by evangelist Franklin Graham, has people in Haiti ready to provide aid to those affected by the storm. Graham posted a video asking people to pray for Haiti, a country that is already impoverished and now faces up to 40 inches of rain brought on by the hurricane.
#HurricaneMatthew has claimed lives & is leaving destruction as it moves. Pray for all in the storm's path. @SamaritansPurse is responding. pic.twitter.com/n1mmbvnSo3
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) October 4, 2016
Publication date: October 4, 2016