GUATEMALA CITY: Scores of people, including 50 in Guatemala, have died as the remnants of Hurricane Eta on Thursday unleashed floods and triggered landslides on its deadly march across Central America.
Eta struck the Caribbean coast of northern Nicaragua as a Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday, tearing through impoverished coastal areas and sweeping away whole villages.
Two days later it exited Honduras as a tropical depression, although weather forecasters warned it could again strengthen into a tropical storm as it heads towards Cuba.
The storm brought heavy rain that caused deadly flooding in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama.
More than 50 people in Guatemala were killed in landslides unleashed by Eta, President Alejandro Giammattei said on Thursday.
“In the morning we had four dead, now the figure is over 50 dead,” Giammattei told reporters late on Thursday as he visited a flood-hit area of the country’s battered Caribbean coast.
Giammattei said that one landslide buried 25 homes in an indigenous community in the north of the country.
The president said it was impossible to reach the area because roads had collapsed due to the heavy rain.
Around 10 people were killed in Huehuetenango in northwestern Guatemala, in another landslide.
The civil protection agency
earlier reported that five people died in separate landslides, including two children aged 11 and two, whose fragile family dwelling was swept
away.
The Guatemala deaths brought the overall toll from Eta to more than 60, as earlier officials said 18 people had died across the region.
Panama also felt the force of Eta’s wrath, as landslides buried two homes in Chiriqui province on the Costa Rican border, killing five people, the National Protection System said. Among the victims were three children.
Landslides also claimed the lives of two children in Honduras, emergency services reported.
In Costa Rica, a 71-year-old American and his Costa Rican wife died when a landslide buried their home in the southern canton of Coto Brus, on the border with Panama. Emergency workers recovered their bodies.
In Honduras, President Juan Orlando Hernandez ordered the army to mobilise helicopters and boats to evacuate flooded areas amid reports of “intense and catastrophic” rain hitting the capital Tegucigalpa and its population of one million.
Landslides swept away roads and bridges around the country.
San Pedro Sula, the country’s second-largest city, as well as the industrial valley in which it sits, were badly hit by floodwaters after the Ulua and Chamelecon rivers overflowed.
Across northern Honduras scores of people were forced to flee to the roofs of their homes as floodwaters rose, relief agencies said. — AFP
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