TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, Sept. 4 — Hurricane Felix, at powerful Category 5 strength, struck the Caribbean coast of Central America early today, beginning a slow and potentially deadly march across Honduras, where residents braced not just for 160-mile-an-hour winds and heavy rains but the mudslides and flooding that were expected to follow.
As Hurricane Felix slammed into Central America today, people gathered at a shelter in La Ceiba, Honduras.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami, calling the storm “potentially catastrophic,” issued a hurricane warning for most of the coastal regions of Nicaragua and Honduras and a hurricane watch for the Caribbean coast of Guatemala and the entire coast of Belize.
The service said the eye of the storm made landfall at about 8 a.m. Eastern time near Punta Gorda, Nicaragua, and was expected to move westward at about 16 miles per hour today before stalling over the inland mountains.
The storm is expected to produce rains of 5 to 10 inches, with isolated maximums of up to 20 inches over northern Nicaragua and most of Honduras
The most vulnerable people in the hurricane’s path, and the first to face its wrath, were the Miskito Indians living in wooden homes along the remote Nicaraguan-Honduran border.
“I’m asking the people — no, I’m ordering them — to leave their wood homes and head to shelters,” Marco Burgos, national commissioner of the Honduran emergency response center, urged coastal residents over the radio. “Not one wooden house is going to survive such a hit.”
Inside the country’s bustling emergency operations center, here in the Honduran capital, soldiers in camouflage mixed with aid workers and government officials, all of whom were working to head off the devastation that struck the region in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch caused an estimated 11,000 deaths.
Mitch, also a Category 5 storm, lingered for a week over Central America, ripping off roofs, devastating bridges and causing such flooding that mountainsides collapsed, burying whole villages.
That was the fear today as Felix struck Nicaragua and began a path that is expected to take it Honduras, into southern Belize and then across northern Guatemala and southern Mexico.
“We’re much more prepared now than we were then,” Mr. Burgos, the emergency official, said in an interview. “We learned a lot from Mitch.”
He said the evacuations that were taking place along the coast, the red alerts that were being issued on local media and the local disaster committees that have been activated to mobilize residents are all outgrowths of the previous storm. President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, wearing a leather jacket, sat at a computer screen late Monday night, monitoring the storm’s trajectory and projecting to the country his government’s readiness.
But no matter the preparations, the country remains poor and vulnerable. “ Most of our municipalities have no firefighters, no ambulances,” Mr. Burgos said. “The people have to save themselves.”
No comments:
Post a Comment