Weathering the Storm: Two Water Sources in Haiti, Two Outcomes

In October 2025, Hurricane Melissa brought heavy rains and flooding to southern Haiti, including the South-East department, where the commune of Marigot received more than half its normal annual rainfall in a single week. Ravines overflowed, landslides struck hillsides and coastal zones, and infrastructure across the department suffered significant damage.

In Marigot, two drinking water systems — fed by two neighboring springs, Médée and Crépin — faced the same storm at the same moment. One managed to continuously deliver water to its community. The other broke down completely. The difference between them illustrates the value of early investment in source protection and disaster risk reduction measures.

Two springs, one territory

Marigot is a coastal commune in Haiti's South-East department, situated east of Jacmel along the Caribbean coast. It is characterized by steep watersheds, small rivers and agricultural valleys. Most of its population depends on small-scale farming — bananas, maize, beans and other food crops — along with fishing and local trade. The commune has high poverty rates and limited access to basic services, including drinking water and road infrastructure. Agricultural production is heavily dependent on rainfall patterns and the condition of the watersheds.

The area’s water resources face significant pressure from historical deforestation, subsistence farming on steep slopes, and unplanned settlement. These factors worsen the impacts of climate hazards, contribute to soil erosion, and reduce the availability of water. Most of the population depends on natural springs captured by gravity-fed systems for their domestic water needs.

The two springs at the center of this story are located in neighboring micro-watersheds. They have comparable characteristics: similar flow rates, watersheds of roughly equivalent size, and exposure to the same types of risk (e.g., earthquakes, landslides, deforestation, erosion, pollution and extreme weather events). Their water systems serve similar-sized populations and were both rehabilitated in recent years. What distinguishes them is not geography or scale, but the protective investments that were made — or not made — before Hurricane Melissa arrived.

How to protect a spring

Protecting a drinking water system requires two distinct types of intervention, each addressing a different risk.

The first protects the water resource itself and its catchment area. This includes delimiting and fencing a protection zone around the spring to prevent human and animal intrusion; treating ravines with dry-stone weirs to slow rushing water; stabilizing slopes with stone walls; planting bamboo and stabilizing vegetation to limit erosion and direct runoff; and reforesting the watershed. These measures preserve water quality, promote infiltration and groundwater recharge, and reduce the transport of sediment toward the catchment box. They are accompanied by the creation of a watershed management committee and awareness-raising among communities and farmers working in the protection zones.

The second intervention protects the built infrastructure; the aim is to keep the physical structures intact when a storm strikes. This is achieved through structural disaster risk reduction measures, including: raising the supply pipe on a cable crossing above the river so it is not exposed to floodwater; constructing a retaining and protection wall around the catchment box and reservoir; and anchoring the cables firmly.

The two types of interventions act together without being interchangeable. Source protection alone would not have preserved the pipes against floodwater. Structural works alone would not have secured the recharge of the spring or prevented contamination of the catchment. A resilient water system requires both.

Médée: Protected, and still in service

The Médée spring and its water system, which serves approximately 1,800 people in the community of Pérédo, were rehabilitated in 2025 under the REGLEAU program, with the municipality of Marigot leading the project. The full package of protective measures was implemented: zoning and fencing of the immediate protection zone around the spring, rehabilitation of the weirs in the recharge zone ravines, slope stabilization with dry-stone walls, planting of bamboo and stabilizing grasses, community training and involvement, and the creation of a micro-watershed management committee. On the structural side, the supply pipe was placed on an aerial crossing above the river, and protective walls were built around the catchment box and reservoir. Farmers in the immediate zone were compensated for the loss of usable land and the zone was formally secured.

When Melissa struck, these preparations were put to a severe test. The weirs and walls sustained breaches but were not destroyed. No scouring was observed at the base of the catchment box, and no landslide was recorded nearby. The vegetation cover remained intact. The one significant damage was the detachment of a single anchor point on the cable supporting the river-crossing pipe. Minor repairs were needed along the network. The water system continued to serve its community throughout the crisis. It also provided a backup supply to part of the population of the neighboring area of Savane Dubois, whose own water source — Crépin — had failed.

Crépin: Unprotected, and out of service

The Crépin spring, serving around 1,500 people before Melissa, presents the opposite situation. Its water system had been rehabilitated in June 2023 by other local and international NGOs. However, no source protection zoning was put in place, no local management committee was established, and the area upstream of the catchment box had received no significant intervention for several years — and in some cases for close to a decade. The pipes ran along and across the riverbed without structural protection.

When the same hurricane struck the same area, the Crépin system had no defenses in place. The catchment box was undermined — scoured at its base by floodwater. Mud and debris accumulated inside the structure. The concrete casing protecting the supply pipe where it crossed the river was damaged in several places. Valves became obstructed, the chlorination system stopped functioning, and leaks opened along the network, particularly where pipes ran exposed above ground. The result was a complete breakdown of the water supply.

In the weeks that followed, cases of cholera and other water-related illnesses were reported in several communes of the South-East Department, including Marigot. With fewer functional water points to share, tensions arose among users. In localities no longer served by the Crépin system, households faced round-trip journeys of over an hour to fetch water.

The cost of prevention vs. the cost of repair

At Médée, the preventive package totaled approximately USD 50,000: around USD 31,000 for source protection works, which were additional to the construction cost, and around USD 19,000 for structural disaster risk reduction works, which were integrated into the construction cost of the system (estimated at approximately USD 279,000 in total). After Melissa, the repair bill came to USD 6,000 — USD $500 for reattaching the pipe to its cable support and addressing minor network damage, and USD $5,500 for reinforcing and restoring the dry-stone weirs at the points where they had been weakened. The water supply was never interrupted.

At Crépin, where no preventive investment had been made, the cost of returning the system to service is estimated at USD 68,000: USD 37,000 for rehabilitation of the water system itself — including a new concrete casing for the river crossing, replacement covers, new valves, rehabilitation of the access ladders to the reservoir, and restoration of the chlorination system — and USD 31,000 for source protection works that had never previously been implemented. The approximately 300 families who had depended on this system were left without water.

The total cost of restoring Crépin to service was approximately 11.5 times the cost incurred at Médée following the same storm. Had Médée not been protected, it would likely have faced a comparable situation to Crépin. While the preventive package reduced the actual post-disaster cost, this analysis does not account for the additional costs borne by the commune and the population for emergency water supply and post-disaster recovery, nor for the public health consequences of the service breakdown at Crépin.

What this demonstrates

The experience of Médée and Crépin confirms that source protection and structural disaster risk reduction are not optional additions to a water system. They determine whether a system can withstand an extreme weather event and continue serving its community when the need is greatest.

The preventive investment at Médée — combining protection of the resource and its catchment with structural securing of the works — paid for itself within a single hurricane, measured against the rehabilitation costs avoided and the maintenance of uninterrupted water supply. The two types of interventions also proved complementary: Source protection kept the catchment intact and disaster risk reduction structural works kept the infrastructure standing.

This experience has also reinforced the commitment of the municipality and residents of Marigot to maintain source protection works, uphold the mitigation structures in place, and rebuild damaged infrastructure to a higher standard.

“Mitigation works such as slope protection and ravine correction for source protection have strengthened the resilience of drinking water supply systems after the passage of Hurricane Melissa.  Marigot must continue to adopt and encourage this approach across all our water systems to ensure resilient water and sanitation services for the communities served,” says René Danneau, mayor of Marigot.

Contributors:

Jean Carls DESSIN, Dieuvenel PHILONE, Danio DARIUS, Jean-Christophe GOUSSAUD, Guibenson COLIN, Mathias PIERRE, Samira CABDULLE, Jana JUNGHARDT, Sophie NGUYEN KHOA, John BROGAN