Costa Rica and Nicaragua braced for hurricane

COSTA Rica declared a national emergency hours before a Caribbean hurricane that was expected to rip into it and neighbouring Nicaragua yesterday.

It is to be the first time Costa Rica takes a direct hit from a hurricane since records began in 1851.

Hurricane Otto, upgraded from a tropical storm by the US National Hurricane Center, was packing sustained winds of 140 kilometres per hour that were forecast to strengthen further before landfall. The slow-moving system was expected to churn slowly through northern Costa Rica and southern Nicaragua over two days, dumping heavy rains that the US centre warned would likely cause “life threatening flash floods and mudslides”.

Both countries had issued red alerts for the areas to be worst-hit, evacuated thousands of people and ordered the closure of schools, some of which were designated shelters.

Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis’s declaration of a national emergency meant government offices would be closed yesterday and today, except the ones dealing with the storm.

“Let me be clear: the hurricane is potentially highly destructive. We hope no one gets hurt, but that is why we must be prepared, and follow authorities’ orders,” Solis warned.

In Bluefields, a Nicaraguan city of 45,000 inhabitants directly in the storm’s path, there was panicked buying of battery-powered lamps, bottled water, canned food and plastic bags.

Otto has already proved deadly in Panama, where on Tuesday its outer band of rains and wind caused a mud- slide that killed two, brought down a tree that crushed a 9-year-old boy in a car in the capital, and drowned an 18-year-old swept away by the Utive River.

Costa Rican officials have ordered the evacuation of more than 4,000 people along the sparsely inhabited northern half of its Caribbean coast. But some were defiantly staying.

Otto was a rare, late-appearing hurricane in the Atlantic storm season, which runs from June to the end of November. It was also on an unusually southern trajectory.