Tropical Storm Gamma lashed Central America on Saturday and killed at least 12 people, three of them in a plane crash on their way to a luxury jungle lodge owned by film director Francis Ford Coppola.
In Honduras, Gamma's torrential rains, which followed several days of downpours from a cold front, cut off Caribbean coast villages, killed at least nine people and left 14 others missing. Several disappeared when a rescue boat overturned in raging river waters.
Slow-moving Gamma is the 24th named storm of a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season and is cutting an erratic course off the Caribbean coast of Central America and toward Cuba, where it is expected to land on Monday. The storm was not expected to gain strength.
Experts said it would bypass Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, which is recovering from a battering by Hurricane Wilma three weeks ago, and revised earlier predictions to say it probably would not directly hit southern Florida, where Wilma also wreaked havoc.
"We expect it to move over central Cuba and then out toward the Bahamas," said Jennifer Pralgo, a meteorologist with the US National Hurricane Center. Over 5,000 people were evacuated on Honduras' Caribbean coast and rescue officials said more than 50,000 were cut off as bridges were damaged or destroyed, leaving several cities and towns isolated. Engineers were working to erect temporary bridges in heavy rainfall.