About 150 more people have died or remain unseeded in Guatemala due to landslides caused through Eta, a strong typhoon who buried an entire village, President Alejandro Giammattei said Friday. other displaced and dead people, and bodies from landslides and floods that killed dozens of people from Guatemala to Panama.
“We will use all resources, human or material, because we will achieve it together,” Giammattei said on Twitter. He also posted a rescue video delivering helicopter assistance.
It will be days before Eta’s true death toll is known: his torrential rains hit economies already strangled by the COVID-19 pandemic, took everything they had little to, and exposed the shortcomings of governments unable to reach out and advocated for foreign aid. .
In Guatemala, the army’s first brigade reached a large landslide on Friday morning in the central mountains where some 150 houses were buried on Thursday, no bodies had yet to be recovered, but said more than a hundred more people would be missing, the army said. Small landslides have blocked roads and roads to the remote city of San Cristobal Verapaz.
On Friday morning, Tropical Storm Eta focused 65 miles east of Belize City.
A week of rain blew crops, swept off bridges and flooded houses in Centroamérica. La the arrival of Hurricane Eta on Tuesday afternoon in northeastern Nicaragua followed days of heavy rain as it crawled towards the coast. Its slow, winding path north through Honduras-driven rivers to its shores and stretched to neighborhoods where families were forced to climb the rooftops to expect relief.
Wendi Mungua Figueroa, 48, and nine relatives huddled Friday morning on the corrugated iron roof of their space surrounded by brown water, but with little drinking water.
“We can’t get off the roofs of our homes because the water reaches our necks in the street,” said Mungua, who controlled about two hours of sleep thursday night in intermittent rain and rainy cold.
He had still noticed lifeboats or authority, his neighbors also occupying their roofs.
His home in La Lima, a suburb of San Pedro Sula, is 50 metres from the Chamelecón River and just a few steps from the runway of the foreign airport. The community was flooded in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch, a typhoon that killed more than 9,000 people in Central America, but Mungia said there was more water this time.
It had been raining heavily since Monday, the center of Eta did not enter Honduras until Wednesday. Anticipating the flood, they had begun to lift appliances and other family items, but the water entered a torrent on Thursday morning.
“In 10 minutes, my space filled up,” he said. We couldn’t escape in any direction because there’s water everywhere. “
Francisco Argeal, leading meteorologist at the Center for Atmospheric, Oceanographic and Seismic Studies, who in the last two days had fallen to 20 centimeters of rain in some areas.
The death toll in Honduras rose to at least 21 on Friday, according to local authorities, however, the country’s emergency control firm reported eight.
“We know there are a lot of deaths, we’ve noticed them, but until we get official information we certify them,” said Marvin Aparicio, head of the agency’s incident command formula. “In the coming hours, we will begin to see, to our dismay, nefarious scenarios of other uncovered people dead” as the flood recedes.
The government estimates that more than 1. 6 million have been affected, said bailouts were taking place in San Pedro Sula and La Lima on Friday, but that the wishes were wonderful and resources limited.
“I would say that national capacity has been exceeded by the magnitude of the effect we are seeing,” said Maite Matheu, director in Honduras of the foreign humanitarian organization CARE, which used its network of contacts in Honduras to identify the most affected spaces and identify their maximum urgent needs.
Honduran Chancellor Lisandro Rosales said on Twitter that “the destruction that leaves us is enormous and public finances are at a critical time by COVID-19, we call on the foreign network to push for the recovery and reconstruction procedure. “
Observers are already predicting that the devastation caused by Eta will push more people to migrate from countries already among the leading migrant carriers on the U. S. border in recent years.
“Now, with this situation, it’s going to be an exodus, a mass exodus of migrants to the north,” Matheu said.
In the early morning of Friday, Eta was a tropical depression with sustained maximum winds of 35 mph and moved north at 7 mph. Forecasts had strengthened her to become a tropical typhoon before arriving in the Cayman Islands on Saturday and crossing Cuba on Sunday. you can succeed in Florida or eventually head to the US Gulf Coast. America, the long-term path remains uncertain.
If Eta made landfall along the U. S. coast, she would break the record for maximum named storms hit by the United States in one season, at age 12, CBS News’ Jeff Berardelli reported.
“Anything that comes out of Central America is going to last a while,” said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University. “I’m convinced we’re done with Eta. “
Agence France-Presse contributed to the report.