Bare forests left Haiti exposed.

Byline: Susannah A. Nesmith

DIBEDOU, Haiti _ The Sot is usually a gurgling little creek, just a few inches deep, that doesn't even provide enough water for the dozen families living near it. They walk 30 minutes to the Branle River to get water and wash their clothes.

But not even two weeks earlier, the Sot rose 30 feet, one of countless creeks, streams and rivers suddenly swollen by the rains that Tropical Storm Jeanne dumped around this and other mountain villages in northwestern Haiti.

It filled the ravine it runs through, washed over a road nearby and met the Branle in a corn field. Together, they flooded a half-mile-wide swath, sweeping people, houses, crops and farm animals in front of them in a furious race to the Caribbean port city of Gonaives.

There, in a city of some 200,000 surrounded on three sides by mountains and the rivers and streams that flow from them, it killed several hundred people. Altogether, Jeanne's floods and mudslides killed nearly 1,200 Haitians and left as many missing.

But the catastrophe began high in those mountains, long deforested as trees were cut to make charcoal, the cheapest cooking fuel in the hemisphere's poorest nation.

Without tree roots, the soil is loose. And when it rains, there's little to soak up the water, so it runs downhill, triggering mudslides and floods that roll toward the sea with killer fury.