The president of Guatemala took stock, this Friday, on the human toll of passage of cyclone Eta in his country. “We estimate that between dead and missing the (still) unofficial figures amount to more or less 150 dead”, Alejandro Giammattei said at a press conference. In total, Eta has left nearly 180 dead or missing and thousands of victims in Central America.
The indigenous village of Queja in northern Guatemala was almost completely buried in a landslide. Floods and cut roads prevented rescue teams from reaching the village on Thursday, but a military squad got there on Friday and began searching for survivors in the rubble, the Guatemalan president said.
Eta should hit Cuba on Sunday
Eta, which made landfall Tuesday on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua in a powerful category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 km / h, gradually weakened as it passed Nicaragua and Honduras. Its torrential rains affected the six countries of Central America. The hurricane is expected to hit Cuba on Sunday, according to the US Hurricane Monitoring Center NHC. It also threatens southeastern Mexico, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and southern Florida.
In Nicaragua, dozens of victims wander in the rubble of their homes that were submerged by torrential rains and their tin roofs swept away by hurricane squalls. The port city of Bilwi, the main city in the north of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, is isolated from the rest of the country by the flooding of the coastal river Wawa, which can only be crossed by boat. The hurricane killed two workers at a gold mine, but authorities have not drawn up a full toll of the damage, Nicaraguan Vice-President Rosario Murillo admitted.
“We have had nothing to eat for two days”
In Honduras, eight people have died, buried in collapsed homes, or drowned in flooding. And there could be more casualties, warned Marvin Aparicio, head of the Copeco Disaster Commission.
The valley of San Pedro Sula, the second city and industrial capital of Honduras, was still submerged in water on Friday. More than 7,000 people were evacuated and accommodated in shelters. Residents of the agglomeration have been launching desperate appeals for help on social networks and television channels since Thursday. “We need a boat or a helicopter. We have had nothing to eat for two days ”, a woman stranded in the Ciudad Planeta neighborhood, near San Pedro Sula airport, was outraged.
In Panama, the damage is concentrated in the province of Chiriqui, bordering Costa Rica, where five people, including three children, were killed in landslides. Rescue workers, who are coming up against cut roads and bridges to reach the disaster area, fear that there will be more victims still in the rubble of houses.
Global warming singled out
In Costa Rica, a landslide buried a house Thursday, killing two people, including an American in his seventies, in the Coto Brus township, bordering Panama. About 20 roads were also cut and about 1,400 people were evacuated and housed in shelters after severe flooding, especially on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.
In El Salvador, a fisherman suffered bad weather, while around 1,700 people were evacuated and are staying in shelters, civil protection said.
Climate change causes the surface water temperatures of the oceans to rise, which favors the formation of more powerful cyclones and hurricanes that bring more rain, particularly threatening for populations, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Change climate change (IPCC).
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