Tuesday was the official start of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, and a disaster-prone Haiti is far from ready for what meteorologists predict will be a heightened storm season with at least 15 named storms.

Some 1.5 million homeless earthquake victims remain under tents and tarps in at least 1,200 camps across the country. Roads remain cluttered with rubble. The Haitian government has designated only two new emergency relocation camps. And few hurricane-resistant transitional houses have been built as the government and international aid groups continue to wrestle with land issues: how to get more of it, how to put up temporary houses, and how to get camp dwellers with safe homes to return or seek higher ground.

"When we first started this operation ... we hoped that we would be able to build a significant number of transitional shelters by the start of the hurricane season," said Alex Wynter of the International Federation of Red Cross. "We've made up our minds that we are going to have to face the emergency or the potential emergency of the rainy season and the hurricane season in the camps."

Initially, the U.S. military designated nine camps, including the Petionville Golf Club, as priorities because some 29,000 people in them were considered most at risk of being washed away with flash floods and landslides.

Since then, the International Organization for Migration has determined that engineers must inspect 120 camps in Port-au-Prince because of concerns about flooding, landslides or standing water from heavy rains. The inspections will determine the measures needed to reinforce the camps, said Shuan Scales, the agency's camp planner.

At the same time, IOM has removed more than 263,000 cubic meters of garbage and sludge from more than six miles of storm drains - some haven't been cleaned in 15 years - to reduce the risk of flooding in the capital.

But while new drainage ditches, cleaner canals and even better pre-positioning of relief supplies by the World Food Program around the country will help reduce the loss of lives, what's desperately needed is available suitable land to relocate camp dwellers, say frustrated aid groups.

For weeks, President Rene Preval has been leading 7 a.m. discussions with key government officials and humanitarian aid groups about how to encourage those with homes to return. The challenge for the government is that as squalid as the conditions are in the camps, many there are reluctant to leave because they are jobless renters who do not own their own homes.

The discussions continue and a lot of it is centered on the Champs de Mars. The population at the downtown Port-au-Prince public square is officially at 25,849, according to the IOM. Others put it as high as 60,000 in the months since the Jan. 12 quake, which killed a government-estimated 300,000 people.

Dozens of tents that were installed several miles away near the old army airport to relocate residents living on the Champs de Mars remain empty, as do many of the homes in the nearby Turgeau neighborhood. Assessments by U.S. army engineers determined that 40 percent of the homes in Turgeau, where many of the initial residents on the Champs de Mars lived, were safe.

But the sprawling downtown camp in front of the ruined presidential palace is not the only pressing concern.

Haiti and international aid agency officials are working on the logistics and financing for hurricane-resistant shelters that can be quickly built and hold up to 800 people. The shelters are desperately needed for the flood-prone city of Leogane, for example, which lost more than 80 percent of its housing in the quake.

"The question is who can finance them? And where can we put them?" said Thomas Pitaud, a technical specialist with the United Nations Development Program.

For two months, UNDP has been holding workshops with Haitian disaster risk officials throughout Haiti to discuss different storm scenarios and remapping dozens of communities to determine new evacuation routes and water patterns.

"The same rain that is killing 200 people in Haiti is not killing anybody in Cuba," said Bruno Lemarquis, UNDP director for Haiti. "It's not the disaster that kills. It's the way a country or its people are prepared."

On Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton, co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, visited Leogane to raise awareness of the need for hurricane-resistant shelters. Clinton said he wasn't happy with the progress so far but was pleased with efforts to provide temporary shelter. Clinton pledged $2 million from his foundation for recovery, including $1 million for disaster preparedness and hurricane safety.

Last month, 500 families were relocated from a steep valley to a new camp in the city of Tabarre, while almost 2,000 families were relocated mostly from the Petionville golf course to Corail Cesselesse. Both sites were designated by the Haitian government for quake victims.

But the speed in which the government selected Corail angered some aid groups who say they had just one week to prepare the site. Some continue to worry about its reliability despite mitigation efforts, which include gravel to prevent standing water and a ditch around the perimeter. They also question whether the light-weight tents provided by World Vision will withstand winds, and worry about the thousands of squatters who have now surrounded the camp with shanties.

"The tents provided by World Vision in Corail were not designed to be permanent shelter for the families there, and, in fact, no tent or tarp is able to withstand that type of weather," said Laura Blank of World Vision. "Because aid agencies were given less than a week to prepare the site, the tents were, and continue to be, the best temporary solution."

World Vision, Oxfam and others say the government needs to stop dragging its feet and quickly decide how to move forward, saying Corail as is, remains a temporary solution.

"Why did we pick a flood plane in the middle of the dessert for this site? We know there is a crunch on land but really? We know it probably could have been done better," said Julie Schindall of Oxfam. "There wasn't adequate coordination and planning."

But if Corail remains worrisome for some, Petionville Golf Club is a model of what can be done.

During a recent tour, U.S. disaster experts pointed out several measures taken to secure the camp from flooding. Employing camp residents, experts laid sandbags, dug ditches and built a fence around a ravine to protect children. They also relocated 4,000 people living in the most at-risk area of the camp.

"This is creating jobs while at the same time saving lives," said Chris Milligan, U.S. response coordinator for Haiti.

Despite the measures, Milligan told Congress recently that much work remains. "We have made progress, but we still are not there yet," he said. "We are still preparing."

(Miami Herald staff writer Lesley Clark contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.)