The highly dangerous Hurricane Felix ripped into Central America on Tuesday, smashing up a port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and threatening deadly mudslides in Honduras and Guatemala. Two people were reported dead in Puerto Cabezas port in northern Nicaragua, where howling winds tore the roofs off homes and badly damaged a church.
"The situation is chaotic. Puerto Cabezas is being totally destroyed," said Antonio Joya, a regional government official. "I'm sure it is going to be a total disaster." Uprooted trees flew through the air as thousands took shelter in two schools in the port, home to some 30,000 mostly Miskito Indians. Ambulances with sirens blaring raced through the streets.
Felix struck the coast as a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm, awaking fears throughout Central America of a repeat of Hurricane Mitch, which killed some 10,000 people across the region in 1998 in floods and mudslides. "There could be serious damage and material, like human, losses, if people do not take precautionary measures," Honduran President Manuel Zelaya warned.
A local deputy said two people had died in Puerto Cabezas but gave no further details. The area where Felix hit is sparsely populated and dotted with lagoons and marshes, but the storm threatened many poor Honduran and Guatemalan villages further inland that are perched on hillsides and vulnerable to mudslides.
"We expect it to cause rivers to overflow, mudslides and damage to roads so we are calling on towns to take preventive measures and evacuate the populations in the most risky areas," said Honduran civil protection officer Jose Ramon Salinas.
Some 70,000 Hondurans were evacuated to shelters, but some 15,000 people were unable to find transport and were forced to ride out the storm in their homes. Felix weakened to a Category 3 hurricane as it crashed through northern Nicaragua but was still very dangerous.
Hurricanes can damage the region's vital coffee crops but Honduran producers said they did not expect a big hit if Felix kept on its predicted route, which takes it through Honduras into Guatemala and then Chiapas in southern Mexico.
In the Pacific, Hurricane Henriette formed off Mexico's coast on Tuesday and bore down on the beach and golf resort of Los Cabos at the tip of the Baja California peninsula.
It was due to strike land later in the day. In Honduras and Nicaragua, emergency workers sailed thousands of Miskito Indians out of sparsely populated, coastal areas near the border, dotted with lagoons and crocodile-infested rivers. The turtle-fishing Miskitos formed a British protectorate until the 19th century. Some 35,000 live in Honduras, and over 100,000 in Nicaragua.
Felix is the second hurricane of the 2007 Atlantic season, and the second Category 5 storm after Hurricane Dean, which killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico in August.
"We are faced with a very serious threat to lives and property. The most important thing is that people pay heed to the call for evacuation so that we don't have to count bodies later," said Honduran civil protection chief Marco Burgos.
The UN World Food Program said it had food stocks in the region that could feed 600,000 people for a month. A Category 5 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale is capable of catastrophic damage and heavy flooding. Hurricane Katrina, one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history, was a Category 3 when it made landfall near New Orleans in 2005. Category 5 hurricanes are rare, but there were four in 2005. Others this year could bolster claims that global warming is fuelling stronger tropical cyclones.
London coffee futures were broadly higher on Tuesday, in speculative buying with concerns on the impact of Hurricane Felix seen as a factor, dealers said.
The storm looked unlikely to re-emerge over the southern Gulf of Mexico, the home of Mexico's major offshore oil fields. Oil monopoly Pemex was still debating whether to evacuate rigs and close oil export ports.
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