JÃ RÃ MIE, Haiti (AFP) – The full scale of the devastation in hurricane-hit rural Haiti became clear yesterday as the death toll unofficially surged past 800, four days after Hurricane Matthew levelled huge swathes of the country’s south.

While the capital and biggest city, Port-au-Prince, was largely spared, the south suffered devastation.

Aerial footage from the hardest-hit towns showed a ruined landscape of metal shanties with roofs blown away and downed trees everywhere. Brown mud from overflowing rivers covered the ground.

Herve Fourcand, a senator for the Sud department, which felt the full force of Matthew, said several localities were still cut off by flooding and mudslides.

A scene of desolation greeted visitors to Jérémie, a town of 30,000 people left inaccessible until Friday.

With power lines down, people have been cut off from communications since the storm struck Tuesday — and had yet to hear that a presidential election due to take place this weekend has been postponed.

Virtually all the town’s corrugated-iron homes have been destroyed, with only a few concrete buildings left standing.

A ship carrying nine containers of food and medical supplies was headed for Dame Marie, further west in Grand’Anse Department.

“It’s probably the hardest-hit department and the conditions don’t allow for a helicopter to land there,” Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph told AFP.

Convoys were headed to other affected areas by land, sea and air, he said, including two helicopters provided by the US military to transport 50 tonnes of water, food and medicine elsewhere in Grand’Anse.

Further south, Haiti’s third-largest town of Les Cayes was battered, its Sous-Roches district turned from a quiet beachfront neighbourhood to a chaos of mud and shattered trees.

The river level has begun to drop, but its waters are still mixed with the storm surge that inundated the beach during the Category Four hurricane’s hours-long assault on Tuesday.

Over 10 hours, blasts of hurricane-force wind and heavy rain levelled all the crops in the community’s fields, promising lean months ahead even by Haiti’s impoverished standards.

Up to 80 per cent of crops have been lost in some areas, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Around one million people are in need of urgent assistance, according to CARE France, a humanitarian group.

“They have nothing left except the clothes on their back,” it said.

As the toll climbed, pledges of aid flooded in, with the United States announcing it was sending a Navy ship, the USS Mesa Verde. France announced it was sending 60 troops with 32 tonnes of humanitarian supplies and water-purification equipment.

Venezuela, in an economic crisis itself, swiftly sent three loads of relief supplies and food.

Many ordinary Haitians are sceptical of help from abroad — in a country where decrepit economic condition is seen as connected to its disastrous post-colonial legacy of foreign intervention and home-grown corruption.

“I’ve never believed in foreign aid,” said Gedeon Dorfeuille, a resident of Les Cayes. “Please, don’t come back promising us billions again if nothing is to come of it.”