Heavy rains hit Haiti over the weekend, killing at least 42 people and leaving 11 others missing, according to a tally released Monday by the Civil Protection.

Heavy rains have caused widespread flooding and landslides in seven of the country’s ten prefectures, which is already mired in an acute humanitarian crisis fueled by gang violence.

According to the UN, which spoke of 15 dead and 8 missing, the rains affected 37,000 people and forced 13,400 to leave their homes.

The town of Leogane, 40km south-west of the capital Port-au-Pres, was particularly hard hit, with extensive damage caused by three rivers overflowing.

At least 20 of its residents have died, according to the first count of emergency services.

“The residents are desperate. They lost everything. The waters destroyed their fields, drowned their animals,” the mayor of Leogane, Ernest Henri, described to AFP.

Thousands of families have been affected in the city, he noted, stressing that they need food, drinking water and medicine.

The floods caused widespread property damage across the country, destroying hundreds of homes and damaging roads.

“Although it was not a cyclone or a tropical storm, the damage seen in the affected areas is great,” Jean-Martin Bauer, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, said in a statement.

Prime Minister Ariel Henri activated the national emergency operations center.

The extremely heavy toll highlights how vulnerable the region’s poorest country is to natural disasters and how big the shortfalls are in terms of risk reduction, as the cyclone season has just begun.

According to Ernst Henri, if work had been done in catchment areas, the damage in Leogane would not have been so great.

Even before facing this disaster, Haiti was facing a very serious crisis, with almost half of its population in need of humanitarian aid, a number that has doubled in just five years, according to the United Nations.