BURIED ALIVE UNDER MOUNTAINS OF MUD
BILWI: Rescue workers are digging through mounds of thick mud in the grim search for bodies as Central American countries began to count the cost of Hurricane Iota, which has left at least 38 people dead.
Initial estimates by the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, put the number of people affected by the hurricane at 4.6 million across the impoverished region, including more than 1.8 million children.
Among the worst-hit areas were the Penas de Blanca mountains in the Matagalpa department of northern
Nicaragua, where rescue workers dug desperately through mudfalls in the search for more victims.
A landslide on Tuesday claimed the lives of nine people, six of them children, but more are missing.
“Coming here and finding my daughter dead … she was my only child. I asked God for a girl and look how it has ended,” said a distraught Orlando Navarrete, father of one of the children.
Iota made landfall in northwestern Nicaragua on Monday as a giant Category 5 hurricane — this year’s biggest Atlantic storm — and left behind
“catastrophic” damage, the government in Managua said.
The US National Hurricane Centre warned that saturated soils from the torrential rain and flooding could unleash deadly mudslides across portions of Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
In Honduras, where at least 14 people died in landslides in the western department of Lempira, civil protection authorities said they were looking for more bodies. Much of the country’s industrial heartland in the northern Sula Valley was underwater.