Red Cross volunteers working at 43 emergency shelters in this city of 250,000 people tended those in urgent need of medical care and food while attempting to count the number left homeless in the storm's wake.

Critical food deliveries were hampered for a second day Sunday amid security fears, although the arrival of a contingent of Uruguayian soldiers serving here with the United Nations should enable deliveries to get through, the local director of the World Food Program, Guy Gauvreau told AFP.

International troops serving here with the UN peacekeeping force have been mobilised to secure key food distribution points and stop them being over-run by famished Haitians.

Gauvreau said there should be enough food to go around, he said some 150 tons had already been distributed to between five and eight food centers around this northwest coastal city.

Health officials fear conditions here could spark outbreaks of diarrhea and typhoid fever unless adequate aid and medical assistance arrives soon.

According to some estimates, 1,196 people were killed by the storm in Gonaives and its four major suburbs with hundreds missing and injured.

In Gonaives' cathedral in the center of the city, some 500 people are being sheltered by the church.

People, many of them families, are attempting to recover amongst its pews moving around on the mud-covered floor.

Some cooked soups and ate bread with utensils they managed to salvage.

"Bread, that's all we've had for a week," complained an elderly lady near Barthelemy Destin, a Red Cross volunteer working at the emergency shelter.

"They have nothing, other than their lives," Destin said.

As the flood waters reside, more grim discoveries are being made as corpses are revealed in cars and under collapsed walls and buildings.

Jeanne, which devastated part of Haiti and the Domincan Republic as a tropical storm, ravage parts of Florida late Saturday and Sunday as a hurricane, causing widespread damage.