GUATEMALA CITY — Flooding and landslides from the season’s first tropical storm have killed at least 145 people and left thousands homeless in Central America, officials said yesterday.
Dozens of people are still missing, and emergency crews are struggling to reach isolated communities cut off by washed-out roads and collapsed bridges caused by Tropical Storm Agatha.
The sun emerged yesterday in hardest-hit Guatemala, where officials reported 120 dead and 53 missing. In the department of Chimaltenango, a province west of Guatemala City, landslides buried dozens of rural Indian communities and killed at least 60 people, Governor Erick de Leon said.
“The department has collapsed,’’ de Leon said. “There are a lot of dead people. The roads are blocked. The shelters are overflowing. We need water, food, clothes, blankets — but above all, money.’’
Didn't seem to help Haiti.
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Volunteers from nearby villages worked nonstop since Sunday to recover the bodies in Parajbei, and yesterday they found the last two: brothers, 4 and 8 years old, who were buried under tons of dirt, rocks, and trees.
As a thank you, rescuers got a plate of rice and beans from the mayor of nearby Santa Apolonia. “It’s a small thing, but it comes from the heart,’’ Tulio Nunez told them through a translator.
Nunez said he worried about the well-being of survivors in the area because the landslides blocked roads and burst water pipes. “They don’t have anything to drink,’’ he said.
In all, some 110,000 people were evacuated in Guatemala.
Thousands more have fled their homes in neighboring Honduras, where the death toll rose to 15 and meteorologists predicted three more days of rain....
First time I've seen Honduras in the paper since the coup.
In El Salvador, at least 179 landslides have been reported and 11,000 people were evacuated. The death toll was 10, President Mauricio Funes said....
Rescue efforts in Guatemala have been complicated by a volcanic eruption Thursday near the capital that blanketed parts of the area with ash and closed the country’s main airport.
Related: Volcanic eruptions stun Guatemala, Ecuador
Officials are now allowing helicopters and propeller planes to take off, but commercial flights remain grounded....
Related(?): God's Coughing Fit
In the Caribbean, one of the countries that could be hardest hit by an active storm season is Haiti, where hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims are still living in tents or under tarpaulins.
Since the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, which killed up to 300,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless, rebuilding has been slow. The Haitian government says it is still working on plans to deal with another natural disaster.
Who stole all that money?
The Atlantic storm season always poses a risk in mountainous Haiti. Tropical Storm Jeanne killed nearly 3,000 people in 2004, and a series of 2008 storms killed 800 — mostly in the country’s central region north of Port-au-Prince.
Maybe I will have to make Haiti my next post.
--more--"
After all, storm is over, right?
"Death toll 179 in Central America landslides; Huge sinkhole investigated in Guatemala" by Juan Carlos Llorca, Associated Press | June 2, 2010
GUATEMALA CITY — Villagers used hoes and pick axes to hunt for victims of landslides that have killed at least 179 people in Central America while officials in Guatemala’s capital tried to cope with a vast sinkhole that swallowed a clothing factory.
I saw the amazing picture of that bottomless pit.
Thousands remained homeless and dozens were still missing following the season’s first tropical storm. Rescue crews struggled to reach isolated communities to distribute food and water....
A woman and two children crossed a flooded alley yesterday after the Mico River overflowed in Amatitlan, Guatemala. (Moises Castillo/Associated Press)
Blew out of the news pages as fast as it blew in.
