The death toll from the calamitous Storm Eta in Central America soared on Friday after the Guatemalan military reached a remote mountainous village where torrential rains had triggered devastating mudslides, killing about 100 people.
Many of the dead were buried in their homes in the remote village of Quejá in the central region of Alta Verapaz, where about 150 houses had been swallowed by mudslides, said army spokesman Rubén Téllez.
The Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, indicated the death toll could jump even higher, with the number of dead and missing in Quejá estimated to total about 150.
One of the fiercest storms to hit Central America in years, Eta on Friday dumped more torrential rain across large parts of Central America, and the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned “catastrophic flooding” in the region would continue.
Rescue operations across Honduras and Guatemala have been slowed by destroyed roads and bridges, forcing authorities to draft in the military and use helicopters and speedboats to rescue people stranded on top of their houses.
Eta wrought chaos after ploughing into Nicaragua as a Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday with winds of 150 mph (241 kph), before weakening to a tropical depression and unleashing torrents of rain on regions of Honduras and Guatemala.
“This is the worst storm Honduras has seen in decades. The damage will undoubtedly be significant,” said Mark Connolly, UNICEF representative in Honduras, who estimated about 1.5 million children there will be affected by Eta.
Giammattei earlier added that bad weather was hampering rescue efforts, which were further limited by the country having only one helicopter for the job. “We have a lot of people trapped [whom] we have not been able to reach,” he said.
A further eight people were killed in Honduras, where Max González, the minister of the National Risk Management System (Sinager), said about 4,000 people had been rescued but many others remained trapped on their roofs.
“We have been without food for two days … waiting to be evacuated,” William Santos, sheltering on top of a banana packing plant with about 300 people in northern Honduras, told Reuters.
Across swathes of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica, high winds and heavy rain have damaged hundreds, if not thousands, of homes, forcing people to take cover in shelters.
Two artisanal miners were killed in Nicaragua while in southern Costa Rica, officials said a landslide killed two people in a house: a Costa Rican woman and an American man.
Near the Costa Rican border in Panama’s Chiriquí province, five people – including three children – died in flooding, authorities said.
On Friday morning, the eye of the storm was on the edge of Belize’s coast and heading out to the Caribbean Sea, charting a course to Cuba and Florida this weekend, the NHC said.
It also said remnants of Eta will continue to batter portions of Central America with “catastrophic, life-threatening flash flooding and river flooding” and added that flash flooding and river overflows were also possible across Jamaica, south-east Mexico, the Cayman Islands and western Cuba.
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