People remove debris from a bridge over the Chamelecon river after the passage of Storm Eta, in Pimienta, Honduras on Nov. 6, 2020.JORGE CABRERA/Reuters
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 Queja village in central region of Alta Verapaz, where about 150 houses had been swallowed by mudslides, Guatemalan army spokesman Ruben Tellez told Reuters, citing preliminary figures.
It appeared the area around Queja village had previously had a huge landslide on a road pass a decade ago, which left dozens of people dead, Mr. Tellez added.
“Now with all this [former hurricane Eta] phenomenon it collapsed again,” Mr. Tellez said.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei indicated the death toll could jump even higher, with the number of dead and missing in Queja village estimated to total about 150.
One of the fiercest storms to hit Central America in years, Eta continued on Friday to dump more torrential rain across large parts of Central America as the U.S. 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 bring in the military and use helicopters and motorboats to rescue people stranded on top of their houses.
Eta wrought chaos after plowing into Nicaragua as a Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday with winds of more than 240 km/h, 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.
President Giammattei earlier added that bad weather was hampering Guatemalan 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 Gonzalez, 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 swaths of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica, high winds and heavy rain have damaged thousands of homes, forcing people to take cover in shelters.
Two artisanal miners were killed in Nicaragua while in southern Costa Rica, a landslide killed two people in a house, a Costa Rican woman and an American man, officials said.
Near the Costa Rican border in Panama’s Chiriqui province, five people, including three children, died in flooding, authorities said.
On Friday evening, the eye of the storm was off the Belizean coast and heading out to the Caribbean Sea, charting a course toward Cuba and Florida this weekend.
But remnants of Eta will continue to batter portions of Central America with “catastrophic, life-threatening flash flooding and river flooding”, NHC said.
Flash flooding and river overflows were also possible across Jamaica, southeast Mexico, the Cayman Islands and western Cuba, NHC added.
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