Tropical storm kills 17 in El Salvador and Guatemala
A flood damaged vehicles in San Salvador, El Salvador, on Sunday. Thousands of people fled to shelters.
Rains from Tropical Storm Amanda left at least 17 dead and seven missing while causing extensive damage that pushed thousands of people into shelters across El Salvador and Guatemala amid the coronavirus pandemic.
EL Salvador Interior Minister Mario Duran said Monday some 7,000 people were scattered across 154 shelters. He said a quarter of the rain that the country normally receives in a year fell in 70 hours.
That set off landslides and flooding, especially in the western part of the country. A day earlier, officials had said at least 900 homes had been damaged.
President Nayib Bukele visited one of the most affected communities on the outskirts of San Salvador. Some 50 families lost their homes, and Bukele said the government would give them $10,000 to rebuild.
One whose home was damaged was Maria
Torres. “We’ve never experienced this,” she said. “The rain was so strong and suddenly the water entered the homes and we just saw how they fell.”
The Legislative Assembly approved the government’s use of a $389 million loan from the International Monetary Fund to deal with the pandemic and the storm’s impact.
El Salvador has reported more than 2,500 infections and 46 deaths.
In Guatemala, a 9-yearold boy was swept away by a river and drowned and another person was killed when a home collapsed, said David de Leon, spokesman for the national disaster agency.
Amanda pounded El Salvador with rain for days before moving ashore as a tropical storm on Sunday and pushing across Guatemala.
It quickly dissipated, but the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Monday afternoon its remnants had formed into a tropical depression in the Bay of Campeche off Mexico’s Gulf Coast and was expected to move through the Gulf of Mexico.