Thousands of residents of the Caribbean region of Honduras began to return home this morning.  The extent of the flood damage caused by Hurricane Beta has not yet been estimated by the government.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Reuters...  About 1,400 Guatemalan villagers were feared dead on Saturday under a huge mudslide triggered by rains from Hurricane Stan, in one of Latin America's biggest tragedies of recent years.

Fire department spokesman Mario Cruz said some 1,400 people had disappeared after the fatal quagmire of mud, rock and trees crashed down a volcano's slopes and into the Maya Indian village of Panabaj in the early hours of Wednesday.

The deaths in Panabaj may more than triple earlier estimates of the toll of storm-related fatalities in the poor, Central American nation. Stan claimed another 67 lives in El Salvador, 20 in Mexico, 10 in Nicaragua and four in Honduras.

Large swaths of land in Central America and Mexico were flooded and dozens of mountain villages were hit by mudslides after days of downpours.

The storm was a low-strength Category 1 hurricane and soon fizzled out, but it dumped enough rain on Central America to be a killer.

The region is particularly vulnerable to rain because so many people live in precarious, improvised dwellings dangerously close to riverbeds and on mountainsides.

Hurricane Mitch killed some 10,000 people in Central America in 1998, mostly in mudslides. Flash floods and mudslides killed a similar number in Venezuela in 1999.

Rescue workers, struggling through roads blocked by mud, only reached Panabaj on Friday, two days after the tragedy. Until they arrived, survivors did what they could to find neighbors, friends and relatives.

"There are no children left, there are no people left," said teacher Manuel Gonzalez, whose school was destroyed. "There were only houses here, for as far as you could see. ... It makes you lose hope."

Forty other people died in the nearby hamlet of Samac.

Guatemala's government said an initial estimate of costs from damage to crops and dead livestock was $389 million.

"Thirty percent of agricultural production is lost. Ten percent of the sugar crop is gone, as well as losses in coffee. The main damage is in export products so we hope local food production is guaranteed," Agriculture Minister Alvaro Aguilar said. Agriculture makes up almost a fifth of the economy.

The tops of lamp posts and trees poked through a river of mud covering Panabaj.

The area is popular with U.S. and European tourists visiting nearby Lake Atitlan, a collapsed volcanic cone filled with turquoise waters.

Many families woke in the middle of the night to rumblings from the volcano's slopes and managed to escape, but others were buried alive when a wall of mud crushed their homes a few hours later.

"If somebody had told us to leave, maybe the people would have got out. But they said nothing. Nothing," screamed Marta Tzoc, who grabbed her five children from their home and fled in time to safety.

A moderate earthquake rocked Central America on Friday, causing the collapse of a rain-damaged highway bridge in Guatemala and sending thousands of frightened Salvadoran residents into the streets.

There were no immediate reports of other damage or injuries from the preliminary-magnitude 5.8 quake in either of the two countries, where nearly 230 people have died during five days of floods and landslides. A magnitude-5 earthquake can cause considerable damage.

Telephone service was cut off briefly in some areas of El Salvador, and Interior Minister Rene Figueroa urged residents to obey evacuation orders for high-risk areas.

The quake forced officials to suspend their search for two coffee workers missing since Saturday when the Ilamatepec volcano erupted about 40 miles west of the capital, San Salvador.

The death toll throughout Central America from flooding and landslides already has reached 241: 160 in Guatemala, 67 in El Salvador, and 14 all together in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

With supplies of food and water running low, governments in Central America and Mexico scrambled Friday to reach isolated areas devastated by a week of intense rains. Residents who spoke to reporters via cell phone said panic was starting to grow among survivors.

The earthquake was centered 35 miles southwest of San Salvador, just offshore, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.