Just days after the devastating magnitude 7.2 earthquake, Tropical Storm Grace struck Haiti on August 17, 2021, bringing heavy rainfall and high winds to a region where hundreds of thousands of people were already sleeping outdoors, displaced from homes that had collapsed or were too damaged to occupy safely. The timing was devastating, arriving just as humanitarian organizations were scrambling to deploy emergency shelter, food, and water to earthquake survivors.
The rainfall from Grace triggered new landslides in areas already destabilized by the earthquake, burying some communities under fresh debris and complicating ongoing search and rescue operations. Road networks that had been damaged by the earthquake and partially cleared were blocked again by storm-related landslides, further delaying the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the most remote affected communities.
For the hundreds of thousands of people sleeping in the open after the earthquake, the storm’s rain brought misery and health risks on top of the physical and emotional trauma of the preceding days. Children and elderly people were particularly vulnerable to the combination of exposure, stress, and the disruption of any remaining routines or support systems.
Humanitarian organizations working in the earthquake zone described the combined impact of earthquake and storm as an almost unbearable layering of disasters. Communities that had already used every resource they had to survive the earthquake now faced a new emergency with nothing left in reserve. The double disaster starkly illustrated the compounding nature of Haiti’s vulnerabilities and the inadequacy of the world’s humanitarian response capacity for a country facing multiple simultaneous emergencies.