Authorities were still searching Tuesday for more than 30 people who were missing in Haiti after the pounding by Tropical Storm Fay, which killed at least 10 people there and was blamed for another five deaths in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Fay also injured one person in Haiti, destroyed 18 homes and damaged the properties of 107 families, Manuela Gonzalez, chief of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince.

These are numbers confirmed so far by the Haitian government and the U.N., but efforts to assess the full extent of the damage are ongoing.

Of the more than 30 missing, 29 people were traveling in a bus that fell in the River Glace on Sunday near the southwestern town of Beaumont. Three bodies have been recovered from that site, two of them babies.

A 14-year-old girl also died when a tree fell on her in the community of Fond Verrettes in the western region of Haiti.

All the other confirmed deaths were the result of drownings in various rivers in the south.

According to Gonzalez, infrastructure damage was minor, including sections of roads connecting to Port-au-Prince. Municipal authorities are so far successfully dealing with the emergency, she added.

Damage also was minimal in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, although five deaths there were blamed on Fay.

Cuba was left largely unscathed by Fay as the storm swept over the island before taking aim at Florida.

Source: http://www.bradenton.com/831/story/821733.html