Rescue workers have clambered over treacherous roads buried in mud and rubble to reach a remote mountain village in Guatemala swamped by a devastating storm that has killed dozens of people, including 22 members of the same family.
Torrential downpours unleashed by Storm Eta toppled trees, engorged swift-moving rivers, and ripped down parts of a mountainside above the village of Queja in the central Guatemalan region of Alta Verapaz, burying dozens of people in their homes.
Storm Eta death toll rises to 100 after devastating mudslides
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The heavy rains were still triggering mudslides in Queja on Saturday as one villager, Gloria Cac, a member of the Poqomchi people, was left distraught by the loss of 22 family members after the mountain collapsed onto the village.
Cac, carrying a small child in her arms, said: “All my family is gone, I’m the only survivor. My dad, mother, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, they’re all gone. Twenty-two family members.”
Francisco Muz, a retired general who was helping in the rescue efforts, said the landslides have not stopped because of the continuous rains in the mountains.
“At ground zero there is a terrible reality … this national tragedy is centered in San Cristobal Verapaz, in Queja village,” Muz said.
It is believed at least 150 people have been killed by the storm in Guatemala. It has also spread destruction from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico, and the death toll in those countries stood at 65 on Saturday.
Panama’s government increased its tally after floods and landslides killed 17 people there. Two miners were reported killed in Nicaragua, while in southern Costa Rica a landslide killed a Costa Rican woman and an American man in a house. A man was killed in El Salvador, and Honduras has reported 25 dead and two missing.
In the Mexican state of Chiapas, flooding has killed 19 people, many swept away by rivers that burst their banks, state authorities said. North of Chiapas in Tabasco state, the deluges killed two more people, the federal government said.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans began evacuating their homes on Saturday as Eta neared the Caribbean island’s southern coast, threatening torrential rain and flooding.
The devastation harked back to Hurricane Mitch, which killed some 10,000 people in Central America in 1998.
Firefighters in the disaster-hit area of Guatemala were preparing on Saturday to make the journey on foot to Queja, which they said could take a full day.
“An attempt was already made to get through but it’s very difficult and we’re really sad we couldn’t get through, but it’s very dangerous,” said Juan Alberto Leal, an official with the local fire service. “The problem is that there are several mudslides throughout the route.”
Ordinarily, the 22-km (13.7 mile) trip between San Cristobal Verapaz and Queja takes an hour by car.
Some 55 soldiers, 25 firefighters and 15 police officers have managed to reach the site of the disaster and were using shovels and picks to search for survivors and retrieve bodies. So far three bodies have been recovered.
“The mud is very thick, it’s hard to know really just how thick, and we’re digging from the surface until we find the first homes and there could be bodies there,” army spokesman Colonel Ruben Tellez said.
It could take months to unearth all the homes, he added.
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