Mitch Death Toll Estimated at 7,000
Tuesday, 3 November 1998
T E G U C I G A L P A , H O N D U R A S (AP)
CENTRAL AMERICANS are discovering today the devastation inflicted by Mitch, a hurricane that killed an estimated 7,000 people, wiped out whole villages and left hundreds of bodies reeking in rivers of mud.
With flood waters receding and communications improving today, the greatest destruction was being reported in Honduras, where an estimated 5,000 people died in last week's storm, officials said.
About 600,000 victims - 10 percent of the population - were forced to flee their homes, and countless more were lacking fresh water, food and medicine, officials said.
Pope John Paul II expressed condolences today and urged worldwide aid to help Central America "overcome these difficult moments." The European Union today approved $7.7 million in aid; the United States on Monday promised $2 million in emergency assistance.
Faced with a national catastrophe, President Carlos Flores Facusse appealed for international help Monday.
"We have before us a panorama of death, desolation and ruin in all of the national territory," he said in a nationally broadcast speech that described how floods and landslides erased many towns from the map.
"There are corpses everywhere, victims of landslides or of the waters," the president said.
Responding to widespread looting and vandalism, Flores Facusse suspended constitutional liberties for two weeks, allowing authorities to seize property, detain suspects and conduct unlimited searches. A curfew was imposed between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Many parts of Honduras remained cut off almost a week after Mitch barreled into the Bay Island of Guanaja with 180 mph winds. The storm pounded the isthmus, dropping up to 25 inches of rain in a six-hour period, before dissipating Monday in southern Mexico.
Virtually all of Honduras suffered flooding, from the lowland marshes on the Atlantic Coast to the mountains, hills and plateaus of the interior.
U.S. military aid flights began arriving Monday in Honduras and U.S. Blackhawk helicopters started distributing aid today in neighboring Nicaragua, where officials said they would fine people who exploit the crisis to raise prices on basic foods.
In Nicaragua, preliminary figures showed 1,330 dead and 1,903 missing.
As many as 1,500 people may have died in mudslides when the crater lake of the Casitas Volcano collapsed, sending a wall of mud and debris miles wide onto several villages below.
By late Monday, soldiers had pulled 808 bodies from the mud. Civil defense officials planned to begin burning bodies today to cut down on the risk of disease.
Nicaragua rejected Cuba's offer to send doctors but accepted medicine from the Communist island. The government has long been a political ally of Cuban exile groups hostile to Fidel Castro.
Another small mudslide on the northern slope of the volcano destroyed 34 homes Monday, but there were no apparent casualties, Nicaragua's defense minister, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, said.
Miguel Angel Ortiz waited three days with his family on a barren hilltop under pouring rain after barely escaping the torrent of mud, trees and rocks that came crashing down on his village of El Ojochal.
They were among the few lucky enough to get out in time. Help never came, and the soggy, quicksand-like mud trapped them for days. They finally walked out Monday, propelled by desperate hunger and thirst.
"There was no food, no water and a lot of disease, a lot of death," the 33-year-old Ortiz said. "We needed to get out of there."
They headed to nearby Chichigalpa, where doctors attended to survivors in an elementary school.
Among the casualties in other Central American countries, El Salvador listed 174 dead, 96 missing and 27,000 homeless. Guatemala reported 100 storm-related deaths. Mexico reported one.
A plane crash in western Guatemala blamed on the remnants of Mitch killed 11 people, 10 of them Americans bringing emergency aid, and injured another seven U.S. citizens Sunday, doctors said.
Bad weather and lack of radar may have caused the crash of the C-47 cargo plane operated by the Living Water Teaching Mission, airport officials in Guatemala said. The plane went down near the town of San Andreas Xecul, 60 miles west of Guatemala City, as it was pelted by rain.
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