Remnants of the once-mighty Hurricane Felix drenched Honduras on Wednesday, threatening to cause dangerous floods and mudslides after killing at least four people and destroying 5 000 homes in neighbouring Nicaragua.
Close to 20 000 people in threatened areas of Honduras were evacuated to safer ground, including hundreds of residents of Tegucigalpa, whose mountainous location puts it at risk from landslides.
As water levels rose, residents rushed to stores to stock up on food, water and other essentials, many remembering all too well how the capital was cut off for days in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America, killing at least 9 000 people.
Now a tropical depression, Felix could dump as much as 63cm of rains in mountainous areas of Honduras, an impoverished nation where numerous people live on unstable mountain flanks or dangerously close to flood-prone rivers.
On Wednesday morning, authorities already reported 123 damaged homes and 10 landslides.
Rain also continued to affect Nicaragua, one day after Felix slammed ashore on the country’s northern Caribbean coast with maximum sustained winds of 260km/h.
An estimated 5 000 homes, many of them built of wood and tin, were destroyed in the region where Hurricane Felix made landfall.
A new-born baby and three men were killed by the storm, authorities said, though because many areas were still unreachable, it was not immediately clear whether there were further casualties.
The worst hit was Puerto Cabezas, an impoverished city of 40 000 where officials said 90% of infrastructure was wrecked. Debris of houses smashed up by the storm downed power lines and uprooted trees littered the ground.
“Puerto Cabezas is destroyed,” said Reinaldo Francis, the governor of Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Autonomous Region, where an estimated 200 000 people live in abject poverty. “People lost the little they had.”
The landfall of Felix marked the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes hit land at category five in the same year, after Hurricane Dean barrelled ashore in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, thousands of residents Mexico’s Baja California were without power and a tourist resort was cut off by floods on Wednesday after Hurricane Henriette roared over the southern tip of the peninsula.
In La Paz, 21 000 residents were left without power and 170 000 had no running water, according to officials. Floods were reported in parts of the city.
The only two roads to the tourist resort of Los Cabos, on the peninsula’s southern tip, were cut off by floods and mudslides, officials said.
A total of 5 000 people were evacuated from La Paz and Los Cabos before the storm hit the peninsula on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Hurricane Henriette was swirling over the Gulf of California heading toward the mainland state of Sonora. — AFP