The rain-heavy remnants of Hurricane Eta flooded homes from Panama to Guatemala on Thursday as the death toll across Central America rose to at least 57.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said that a water-soaked mountainside in the central part of the country had slid down onto the town of San Cristobal Verapaz, burying homes and leaving at least 25 dead.
Two other slides in Huehuetenango had killed at least 12 more, he said.
Photo: AP
The president initially said that more than 50 people had died in slides, but the individual incidents he cited did not reach that total.
Later, David de Leon, spokesman for the national disaster agency, said there were reports of 50 people missing in the Verapaz slide, but government rescue teams had not reached the site.
Earlier on Thursday, five others had been killed in smaller slides in Guatemala.
Giammattei said on that 60 percent of the eastern city of Puerto Barrios was flooded and 48 more hours of rain was expected.
Guatemala’s toll was on top of 13 people killed in Honduras and two in Nicaragua.
Panamanian authorities reported eight missing.
Eta had sustained winds of 55kph and was moving north at 13kph. It was centered 140km northwest of La Ceiba, Honduras.
The storm that hit Nicaragua as a Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday had become more of a vast tropical rainstorm, but it was advancing so slowly and dumping so much rain that much of Central America remained on high alert.
Forecasters said that the now-tropical depression was expected to regather and head toward Cuba and possibly the Gulf of Mexico by early next week.
In Honduras, police said that six more bodies had been found.
The bodies of two adults and two children were found after excavations in a mudslide on Wednesday in the township of Gualala, and two boys aged eight and 11 died in another mudslide in El Nispero.
Earlier, residents found the body of a girl buried in a landslide on Wednesday in mountains outside the north coast city of Tela.
In the same area, a landslide buried a home with a mother and two children inside it, Honduras Fire Department spokesman Oscar Triminio said.
There was also a two-year-old girl killed in Santa Barbara Department when she was swept away by floodwaters, Triminio said.
Hundreds of residents of San Pedro Sula neighborhoods had to abandon their homes before dawn on Thursday when water from the Chamelecon River arrived at their doorsteps.
Miguel Angel Beltran, a security guard from the city’s Planeta neighborhood, said that his district was lost and many people were missing or drowned.
“We rescued my brothers, all the family from a balcony, a three-story building,” he said. “How is it possible that a government has done nothing to warn people.”
His family lost everything and had nowhere to go, he said.
The few boats rescuing people had no motors and struggled against the current, he said.
Marvin Aparicio of Honduras’ emergency management agency said that 41 communities have been cut off by washed out roads.
Luis Alonso Salas, a 45-year-old construction worker, stood on high ground at a gas station where people who fled their homes picked over a pile of donated clothing.
“It was terrible, I lost my whole house, I couldn’t take anything,” Salas said.
At 1am water was up to his neck, he said, adding that others in his neighborhood were still waiting for rescuers in boats from atop their roofs.
Maite Matheu, country director for the international humanitarian organization CARE, said that about 2 million Hondurans could be directly affected by the storm.
“The situation that we are seeing today is very, very alarming,” Matheu said. “Mainly the people and families that need to be evacuated right now. There are dozens of families in some towns in the Sula valley who are on their roofs and are asking to be evacuated.”
The Honduran government did not have the capacity to rescue people, she said.
Giammattei said that Honduran Preseident Juan Orlando Hernandez had asked for help, but blocked roads made it impossible to do so.
Matheu said that her organization was helping gather information about the most pressing needs across Honduras.
The food supply was a real concern, she said.
The country’s road network is badly damaged, airports were closed and much of the Sula valley, the country’s most agriculturally productive, was flooded, she said.
“The impact on crops is going to be enormous,” Matheu said.
In Panama, at least eight people were reported missing after flooding and landslides in the province of Chiriqui.
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