Nicaragua, September 4
The highly dangerous Hurricane Felix ripped into Central America on Tuesday, smashing up a port on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast and threatening deadly mudslides in Honduras and Guatemala.
Two persons were reported dead in Puerto Cabezas port in northern Nicaragua, where howling winds tore the roofs off homes and badly damaged a church.
“The situation is chaotic. Puerto Cabezas is being totally destroyed,” said Antonio Joya, a regional government official.
Uprooted trees flew through the air as thousands took shelter in two schools in the port, home to some 30,000 mostly Miskito Indians. Ambulances with sirens blaring raced through the streets.
Felix struck the coast as a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm, awaking fears throughout Central America of a repeat of Hurricane Mitch, which killed some 10,000 persons across the region in 1998 in floods and mudslides.
The area where Felix hit is sparsely populated and dotted with lagoons and marshes, but the storm threatened many poor Honduran and Guatemalan villages further inland that are perched on hillsides and vulnerable to mudslides.
— Reuters
