BILWI | Torrential rains from Iota, now a tropical storm, continued to wreak havoc in Central America on Tuesday.
Iota, who touched the North Caribbean coast of Nicaragua on Monday evening at the height of his destructive power, has already killed four people: one on the Colombian island of Providencia, a woman in an indigenous community in Panama and two children in Nicaragua, swept away by a swollen river they were trying to cross.
After hitting the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast as a category 5 hurricane, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale, “Iota deteriorated into a tropical storm, with maximum sustained winds of 105 km / h” by entering the land, Nicaraguan meteorologists said.
Although weakened, Iota continued on Tuesday on its way west, through Central America already devastated less than a fortnight ago by Cyclone Eta, which made landfall in Nicaragua as a category 4 hurricane.
Cyclone Iota will continue to cause flooding and flooding of rivers, posing a deadly threat to populations until Thursday, warns the American Hurricane Monitoring Center (NHC).
In Honduras and Nicaragua, the damage “could be worsened by the recent effects of Hurricane Eta” which killed at least 200 people and affected 2.5 million people in Central America, underlines the NHC.
Cut off from the world
The torrential rains and squalls of the hurricane cut off Bilwi, the main port city on Nicaragua’s North Caribbean coast, which received the first shock from the hurricane.
Its tens of thousands of inhabitants remained deprived of telecommunications, water and electricity on Tuesday. The flooding of the Wawa River also prevented any passage between the region and the rest of Nicaragua.
“Trees fell, as well as electricity pylons, roofs of houses flew away and a hotel lost all of its roof,” said the director of the Nicaraguan civil protection services (Sinapred), Guillermo Gonzalez.
A total of 114,200 homes are without electricity and 47,638 do not have running water after the passage of Iota, according to the Nicaraguan authorities.
In Bilwi, the neighborhoods closest to the coast were flooded from the first rains brought on Monday by the approaching hurricane, AFP journalists noted on the spot.
“The wind is too strong. He took everything away: the roof and the wooden windows of my solid-built house, ”Jessi Urbina, who lives in a neighborhood near the port, told them. The wind blew the tin roofs “as if they were made of cardboard”, residents also testified.
Nicaraguan civil protection fears landslides in lands already soaked in water by Eta.
The whole region is threatened
The effects of the hurricane were also felt on the Caribbean coast of nearby Honduras.
The squalls destroyed the roofs of 38 homes in the indigenous coastal Miskito village of Nueva Jerusalem as trees were uprooted, Honduran Civil Protection (Copeco) reported.
The Iota center is expected to enter Honduras on Tuesday evening, according to Copeco.
Police and military continued on Tuesday to evacuate residents of areas at risk in the valley of San Pedro Sula, the second city and industrial capital of Honduras, as well as in neighborhoods close to rivers or those threatened by landslides in Tegucigalpa , the capital.
As it strengthened in the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, the hurricane destroyed 98% of infrastructure and killed a resident of the Colombian island of Providencia, Colombian President Ivan Duque said on Twitter.
In Guatemala, where the previous hurricane left 46 dead and 96 missing, the approach of Iota was felt by intermittent rains on Monday.
The Guatemalan Meteorological Institute predicts an increase in precipitation on Wednesday and Thursday across the country on already soggy soils, conducive to further flooding, landslides and damage to road infrastructure.
In Panama, civil protection services have reported the death of an indigenous woman while more than 2,000 people are accommodated in shelters, as tens of thousands of residents driven from their homes across Central America .
Warming seas caused by climate change make hurricanes stronger longer after they make landfall, scientists say.
A record 30 tropical storms have been recorded this season in the Caribbean, Central America and the Southeastern United States.
The heads of state of Central America, who accuse the industrialized countries of being responsible for global warming, jointly presented on Monday a request for aid for reconstruction to international financial organizations.