by Rod Hughes
A word about the weather: Wet.
Hurricane Felix, a category 5 storm when it brushed the island of Aruba over the weekend, could bring heavy rainfall to Costa Rica even though it will likely pass well out to sea. Costa Rica has been lucky because the pattern is for the main body of storms to miss the Caribbean coast entirely. But lower air pressure in the Caribbean usually means that wet Pacific air is sucked in and “wrung out” of its rainfall.
As this is written Felix has been derated to category 4 and is expected to hit the northern Nicaraguan and southern Honduran coasts Tuesday. Felix was an unusually fierce storm and a hurricane hunter aircraft, flying close to the inner wall of the eye late Sunday afternoon, clocked a wind gust at 192 mph.
Judging the effect on Costa Rica is a tricky business due to the indirect nature of a hurricane’s impact on this country. Hurricanes that have directly hit northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras have brought flooding to Costa Rica in years past. The closest in recent history that a hurricane made landfall near Costa Rica was one that hit Bluefields, Nicaragua, on that country’s central Caribbean coast.
On Friday when Felix was a mere tropical depression, it was expected to bring in moist air and some flooding was feared along the Pacific coast. Certainly the weanth turned from wet to wetter. Sunday, an Escazu couple and their 15-year-old daughter escaped death by a hair as they waited for the Ministry of Public Works to clear a landslide off the highway at La Garita de Alajuela. A giant boulder broke loose from the water-saturated hillside above and slammed down on the car, reducing its normal height by a third. The family escaped with abrasions and bruises.
The National Emergency Committee is keeping a wary eye on things, since the soil is saturated, a condition often provoking mudslides and severe erosion that swells rivers.