Tomas Waxes And Wanes

This morning, Tomas is rebuilding, after peaking in strength and weakening considerably in the early morning hours. Tomas pounded Haiti's Cap Carcasse region (where the city of Jeremie is), and Jamaica's Morant Point pretty hard. Today, Tomas is assaulting Cuba's Punta de Maisi, where it will briefly make landfall, as well as the entire area around Guantanamo, plus Haiti's Cap-a-Foux.

News reports are beginning to filter back of - you guessed it - trouble in Haiti:

In the westernmost tip of Haiti that juts into the Caribbean Sea and is closest to the hurricane, there were reports from the town of Jeremie of destroyed houses, downed trees and flooded rivers, said Marie-Eve Bertrand, communications manager for CARE in the nation.

Tomas also was being felt in Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital.

"It's been raining heavily all night," said Leonard Doyle, the spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.

"The rain is a huge problem where we are," Doyle told CNN on Friday morning. "There's every danger that you could have flash flooding. Every danger."

Relief worker Roseann Dennery of Samaritan's Purse was near Cabaret, about 20 miles north of Port-au-Prince, on Friday morning touring camps that hold some of the 1 million people left homeless by January's 7.0-magnitude earthquake, which killed 250,000 people.

"It's almost eerie," she said. "It's rainy, it's dark and there's really not a lot of movement."

The few people moving from tent to tent were wrapped in sheets and cloth to provide some protection against the constant rain, she said. The ground is soaked and some low-lying areas have minor flooding.

Some people are riding the storm out in open-air community centers with supposedly sturdy roofs, she said. But many are just huddling in their tents, waiting for the wind and rain to pass. Most don't have anywhere else to go.

"A lot of them do not have families or relatives," she said.

She said her agency, an international Christian relief organization, has evacuated 30 staff members from Leogane out of fear of mud slides there.

Michael Dockrey, the director in Haiti for the International Medical Corps, also expressed his deep concern early Friday.

"Particularly," he told CNN, "with mudslides that can cut off whole communities. We have prepositioned medical supplies, tents, tarps and staff in areas that we know will be isolated."

Aid workers already were struggling to keep up with the cholera outbreak, which has killed nearly 450 people and hospitalized about 7,000. The bacterial disease causes diarrhea and vomiting that can lead to deadly dehydration within hours.

"It's obviously stretched us all real thin," Dockrey said. "We could certainly use more help ... as can all the other responders."

Aid sits as cholera spreads in Haiti The hurricane will only make matters worse.

"Even if Tomas only brushes Haiti, it may exacerbate the epidemic, facilitating the spread of the disease into and throughout metropolitan Port-au-Prince, where a third of the population remains homeless and in camps," the International Organization for Migration said.

Some Haitians scurried Friday morning through the rain-pelted streets of Port-au-Prince, looking for somewhere to seek shelter, reported CNN en Espanol's Diulka Perez. They have been told to go to churches or the homes of friends and family, but there are significantly fewer churches or homes still standing after January's massive earthquake.

There is also no public transportation available to take people anywhere, Perez reported.

The problem is compounded, she said, because there's no central source of information. Haitians are having to rely on word of mouth to obtain information.