NICARAGUA: President Ortega visits areas affected by Hurricane Felix in Nicaragua

Hurricane Felix killed at least 38 people on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and more than 80 people were missing after the storm destroyed thousands of flimsy homes, the government said on Wednesday (September 05). As soldiers combed the area around Puerto Cabezas port, the Navy tried to reach settlements on marshy spits of land or on keys to look for more casualties from Felix, which crashed into the coast on Tuesday (September 04) as an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane. People wept at the harbor in Puerto Cabezas, inhabited mostly by Miskito Indians, for 12 fishermen they said never returned from work. Visiting the area, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said about 9,000 homes in the area were destroyed. Residents worked with police and soldiers to try to clear dozens of uprooted trees lying in the streets. Felix revived memories throughout Central America of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in 1998. The latest storm weakened to a tropical depression after entering Honduras on Tuesday (September 04) and residents of the capital, Tegucigalpa, appeared to escape major damage this time around. Only drizzle fell in Tegucigalpa, which flooded when Mitch rampaged through, but heavy rain in the north of the country flooded villages and left two rivers close to bursting their banks. There were no reports of deaths in Honduras. Felix came on the heels of another Category 5 hurricane, the most powerful type of storm. Last month, Hurricane Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico last month. It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes made landfall as Category 5 storms in one season. In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Henriette, a Category 1 storm, hit mainland Mexico after lashing the Los Cabos resort on Tuesday (September 04) before roaring through the Gulf of California. Ortega said that the damage was serious and it was difficult to get provisions to remote areas. "We were prepared. Nicaragua is ready to bring food, water. All those supplies are available, but these provisions can't be brought due to lack of transportation, because in this area the only way to solve the problem is by air," Ortega said. A foreign tourist walking on the beach in Los Cabos, on the Baja California peninsula, was killed on Monday (September 03) after being dragged away by big waves as the storm approached. Coffee producers in Nicaragua and Honduras did not report damage to the crop, vital to the two countries' economies.

ITN Source | September 6, 2007

Tags:. .type. .mexico. .throughout. .affected. .memories