A tent camp at the Petionville Club in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, holds about 40,000 peo­ple, accord­ing to local orga­niz­ers. Offi­cials say 250,000 peo­ple across the city need to be moved out of camps such as this one before the rainy sea­son arrives in the next few weeks. This camp is at the bot­tom of a ravine and could flood dur­ing a heavy rain.

Aid groups and the gov­ern­ment in Haiti have iden­ti­fied tent camps hold­ing more than 200,000 peo­ple who could be in great dan­ger if the res­i­dents aren’t moved before sea­sonal heavy rains begin in the next cou­ple of weeks.

These high-risk camps are in flood plains or directly under unsta­ble hillsides.

Yet the process of relo­cat­ing earth­quake vic­tims for a sec­ond time has been extremely slow.

On a recent day at the Petionville Club camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s cap­i­tal, peo­ple jock­eyed for posi­tion in a line wait­ing for food that Catholic Relief Ser­vices was about to hand out.

Set in a ravine at the bot­tom of a golf course, the camp is made up of thou­sands of makeshift tents con­structed out of sticks and bedsheets.

It is one of the largest encamp­ments in Port-au-Prince — and poten­tially one of the most dangerous.

Romelus Rey­nald lives in the camp and is one of the orga­niz­ers of the local refugee com­mit­tee. He says that roughly 40,000 peo­ple moved to the camp after the earthquake.

Marie Clau­dine Macena (with two of her daugh­ters) lives with seven oth­ers in a shel­ter at the Petionville Club camp. Macena says her shel­ter floods every time it rains. The camp is among those the U.N. des­ig­nated as being in urgent need of relo­ca­tion before the heavy rains begin.

He says that when it rains, the entire place turns to mud, and the heavy rains haven’t arrived yet.

The camp res­i­dents must move, and Rey­nald says the gov­ern­ment has a plan in place to do so. But just where it is going to move them is another question.

The United Nations has iden­ti­fied sev­eral sites for new camps on the edges of Port-au-Prince. But so far, only a cou­ple of hun­dred fam­i­lies have been moved into one of those new settlements.

Marie Clau­dine Macena lives with seven other peo­ple at the Petionville Club camp. Her tent con­sists of sheets strung up on sticks, with an orange tarp tied over the top. At night, she sleeps with her chil­dren on a bed of cardboard.

“The last time it rained, it was ter­ri­ble,” Macena says. “We had to stand up because the water was every­where. Maybe for the rainy sea­son it’s going to be like that. Maybe we are going to have to stand up for the whole night.”

The hard rains in Haiti usu­ally start in April.

“We’re in a race against time,” says Tony Ban­bury, the sec­ond in com­mand of the U.N. mis­sion in Haiti.

Ban­bury says the pri­or­ity for the U.N. dur­ing this moment of the cri­sis is to get peo­ple some form of shel­ter and relo­cate those who are liv­ing in the most haz­ardous locations.

He says there are about 250,000 peo­ple liv­ing in “really dan­ger­ous places.”

“So when the rains do come, peo­ple are going to be washed away — their tents, what­ever they’re liv­ing under, just washed out. Some are lit­er­ally liv­ing in a dry riverbed that’s going to be a rag­ing tor­rent when the rains come,” Ban­bury says.

The human­i­tar­ian response is in a fran­tic mode. There is no expec­ta­tion that things are going to be done per­fectly or that every­one is going to get a tent.

A recent U.N. memo said the goal is sim­ply to get earth­quake vic­tims “some­thing water­proof” to put over their shel­ters before the rains hit. The U.N. esti­mates that they’ve man­aged to do this for just over half of the fam­i­lies in need.

Depend­ing on whether the rains hold off, they have a few weeks to dis­trib­ute plas­tic sheet­ing to hun­dreds of thou­sands more, and try to relo­cate a quar­ter of a mil­lion peo­ple to camps that are not yet built.