Rains from Hurricane Felix soaked Honduras on Wednesday, threatening dangerous flooding and mudslides after killing nine people in neighboring Nicaragua. The storm, which was a powerful Category 5 when it struck the Caribbean coast of Central America, revived memories of the killer Hurricane Mitch in 1998 but residents of Tegucigalpa appeared to have got off lightly this time around.
TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - Rains from Hurricane Felix soaked Honduras on Wednesday, threatening dangerous flooding and mudslides after killing nine people in neighboring Nicaragua.
The storm, which was a powerful Category 5 when it struck the Caribbean coast of Central America, revived memories of the killer Hurricane Mitch in 1998 but residents of Tegucigalpa appeared to have got off lightly this time around.
Only drizzle fell in the capital, which flooded badly when Mitch killed over 10,000 people in a rampage through Central America, and there were no reports of deaths.
Felix killed at least nine people on Tuesday around the Nicaraguan Caribbean coastal town of Puerto Cabezas, where it damaged over 5,000 houses and uprooted trees. At least 11 people were missing.
Four of the dead drowned, and another was a woman who was crushed when a tree fell on her house.
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Felix weakened to a tropical depression and headed southwest toward the border with El Salvador, but Honduran emergency services warned the worst might not be over.
"If we have constant precipitation we could have problems of rivers overflowing and ravines flooding," said Jose Ramon Salinas, a senior civil protection official.
The hurricane came on the heels of another Category 5 storm, the most powerful type. Last month, Hurricane Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico.
RECORD STORMS
It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes made landfall as Category 5 storms in the same season.
Bad memories of Hurricane Mitch nine years ago are fresh in Honduras, a coffee-producing country home to 7 million people.
"After Mitch, we were very shocked and didn't have the energy and strength for another hurricane. Thank God nothing happened," said social worker Jose Luis Bordas in the capital.
In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Henriette was headed through the Gulf of California toward mainland Mexico after lashing the Los Cabos resort on the Baja California peninsula on Tuesday with winds and rain.
It was due to hit the state of Sonora and Sinaloa as a Category 1 storm.
A foreign tourist walking on the beach in Los Cabos was killed after being struck by big waves on Monday as the storm approached.
Coffee producers in both Nicaragua and Honduras said there were no reports of damage to the crop, vital to the two countries' economies.
Despite growing consensus that global warming may spawn stronger tropical cyclones, weather experts believe it is too soon to blame climate change for the back-to-back hurricanes.
(Additional reporting by Ivan Castro in Managua)
