ANOTHER BLOW TO HAITI AS HURRICANE TOMAS BRINGS WIDESPREAD FLOODS!

New York's Haitian community was in a panic Friday, frantically trying to reach loved ones as Hurricane Tomas battered their quake-ravaged homeland.
Yves Noel, 38, who owns a photography shop on Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn, was hoping to make contact with his parents and sister in Port-au-Prince.

"Everybody's worried," he said. "Sometimes you are so worried that you can't even explain it.

"You can't sleep. It puts a lot of pressure on you."

Edrice Jocelyn, 40, a pharmacy technician, spoke with his wife and 11-year-old son in Port-au-Prince. They are safe and sheltered, but his heart aches for his other countrymen.

"I feel so sad for those people right now," he said. "If I had the money, I would go there to build something."

Packing 75 mph winds, Tomas roared over Haiti's southern peninsula yesterday. Towns were flooded, streets turned into garbage-filled rivers.

The quake left more than a million people homeless, and as the hurricane bore down, many of them refused to leave tent cities they call home.

Hermine Gauthier, 38, of Deer Park, L.I., said her aunt, her uncle and their 11kids have been sleeping outdoors since the quake.

She said relatives told of thousands crammed into a tiny church in Carrefour, outside Port-au-Prince, debating whether to seek higher ground or "stay and die."

"When you're talking to somebody, and they're saying, 'If we have to die, let it be in the church parking lot,' that's deep," she said.

In addition to the physical damage, Haiti faces other challenges from the hurricane.

Officials predict heavy rains could worsen a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 400 people in a month.

Two public health experts from Harvard University and the UN urged researchers to determine whether Nepalese UN peacekeepers were the source of the outbreak, The Associated Press reported.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the cholera strain matches strains found in South Asia.

At the Church of God on Flatbush Ave., Joel Desroches, 25, said Haitians have strong resolve - but he wondered how much more they could endure.

"It's devastating," he said. "We know the country has been through a lot already. What more can we take?"