by Rod Hughes
Not since Hurricane Mitch nearly 10 years ago, has Central American received such punishment from a tropical storm, reports say. But Mitch was not a Category 5 as this one is, yet killed nearly 10,000 in Honduras and El Salvador.
Hurricane Felix made landfall on Nicaragua’s north coast with winds up to 110 miles per hour The area hit is sparsely populated but this factor means that the infrastructure is poorly developed and many of the devastated small villages even in the lowlands are accessible only by air or sea. Felix is also slowing down as it moves into Honduras, which means that the heavy rains will have more time to fall, increasing danger of flooding and mudslides.
The hurricane lost some force and is, as this is written Tuesday morning, been downgraded to a Category 3, little solace since some of the small Indian villages in the Honduran mountains, with their lightly-built houses, often badly damaged by mere tropical rainstorms. Of concern is that most of these villages are at the feet of mountains, vulnerable to landslides. One report from Nicaragua says that wind blasts tore off roofs from some refugee shelters so that those who had abandoned their homes were exposed to the elements anyway.
Here in Costa Rica, some 200 shelters are ready to receive those forced from their homes by the heavy rains Monday afternoon that went on well into the night. In Golfito and the Corredores in the southern Pacific zone, several rivers threatened to overflow their banks during the night. In Golfito, ll persons were forced from two homes into shelters.
Longtime Golfito resident Gorgina Barrantes told the newspaper La Nacion, “In the more than 40 years I’ve lived here I haven’t seen anything like this.” With the soil thoroughly soaked throughout the country, there is nowhere for the water to go except to run off the surface and into the rivers. The National Emergency Committee reported that the road between Rincon de Osa and Puerto Jimenez de Golfito is closed due to severe damage to the bridge over the Aguja River.
The National Meteorlogical Institute has no consoling information but expects the continued effect of Felix to last two more days here. Currently, the Emergency Committee is maintaining a yellow alert throughout Costa Rica.
CNN reports that this is the first time two such heavy hurricanes have made landfall in a single hurricane season since the 1880s.