Fears for Haiti earthquake survivors as rainy season approaches

John Holmes, the British diplomat who heads the UN's disaster relief programme, has called for a massive increase in the provision of shelter and sanitation in Haiti before the arrival of the rainy season in a few weeks. Holmes, who is chief of the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs, said the rains presented a "very big challenge" because of possible flooding and spread of disease. The UN has embarked on what he called a "shelter and sanitation surge" in the face of what could turn into a second wave of disaster. The UN has identified about 20 locations that pose a danger to people in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, which endured the most concentrated impact of the 12 January earthquake . Some areas are at risk of catastrophic flooding. Others are on such steep slopes, meaning that the makeshift homes in which people are sheltering would be washed away. The sites include a golf club in the Pétionville area of the city which the US military used as a base to distribute food and water at the start of the disaster, and the main square in front of the presidential palace, where thousands are living in overcrowded and insanitary conditions. Up to 150,000 people are thought to be living in these danger points, and about half of them need to be moved to other parts of the city or beyond. To prepare for such a relocation, the UN is trying to speed up the clearance of rubble from core locations to make way for tent cities designed to cope with the rains. Holmes said it would not be easy to shift such large numbers of people in time, partly because "people don't want to go very far". He added: "Even if we had some big sites outside Port-au-Prince – which we don't – it might be difficult to persuade people to move." Last month Holmes visited the relief effort in Haiti. In his summary of what he found, emailed to senior aid staff and subsequently leaked to the website Foreign Policy , he warned that "major unmet humanitarian needs" remained in Haiti and he called for a "much more aggressive approach" to meeting those needs. He also expressed disappointment at the way clusters were working – the system of co-ordination set up after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 200,000 people. Twelve separate clusters, including shelter and sanitation, are designed to ensure that the UN, International Red Cross and other NGOs work seamlessly together, but Holmes wrote in his email that "very little progress has been made in this critical area". In his starkest warning, Holmes wrote that a lack of progress in bringing help to Haiti could end in "large demonstrations in some sensitive places". "If it starts to rain very heavily and people are still cowering under their bedsheets then they are going to get very cross and there's a chance for things to boil over," he said. The rains are the imminent threat, but a further huge challenge could strike as early as June with the hurricane season. The humanitarian relief chief said the UN was scrambling to provide temporary housing for some of the 1.2 million Haitians thought to be homeless, in the form of tin-roofed wooden structures anchored to the ground. "Plastic or tarpaulin roofs are not going to do the business if there's a direct hit by a hurricane," he said. The UN hopes to have up to 100,000 such temporary homes constructed by June, and with up to five or six people for every household that should provide very basic protection for about half of those homeless. On the overall relief mission so far, he said: "Have we been perfect? No, I'm sure we weren't. It takes time set things up in such a huge disaster that is a once in 10-year event."