The death toll in Honduras from one of the century's most powerful Caribbean hurricanes could top 5,000, a relief operations official said yesterday. If this estimate is confirmed, the overall death toll from Hurricane Mitch's five-day rampage through Central America last week could approach 7,000. The hurricane dissipated on Sunday.
"Officially, we have 362 dead and 357 missing," Lieut Col Saul Carrillo, a top official with the Honduran Civil Defence Commission, said. "But really, the number of deaths could top 5,000. There are many areas where communication is cut off and many people may have been swept away by the floods or buried by rubble."
At least 1,320 deaths had been officially reported in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala by mid-day yesterday, although relief officials said the toll was rising every hour. It has so far proved impossible to provide an exact death toll.
Nicaraguan officials fear up to 1,500 people may have been swallowed up when torrential rain caused the slopes of the Casita volcano to give way, burying whole villages under a carpet of mud and rocks covering 30 square miles. "We may never know how many died," Vice President Enrique Bolanos of Nicaragua told a news conference.
He said rain water may have built up in the Casita volcano, which has a peak of 4,600 feet (1,405 metres), forming a lake in the crater that eventually burst and came cascading down on Saturday.
"The mountain exploded, a wave of mud, water rocks and trees came pouring down, leaving nothing in its path," a survivor, Mr Raul Espinoza (78), said from a chaotic hospital in nearby Chinandega. The hospital was packed with children wearing casts and the wounded tending to their own open wounds. "I've never in my life seen so many bodies tossed about, not even in the war," said a veteran news photographer, German Miranda, of La Prensa newspaper, referring to Nicaragua's civil war of the 1980s that killed 30,000 people.
Mitch did most of its damage after hitting land in Honduras on Thursday, dumping torrential rain for several days straight over Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Caribbean coast of Honduras was pounded by several feet of rain, wiping out tourist resorts on islands offshore.
Irish aid workers in Central America have provided dramatic eye-witness testimonies of the damage, writes Paul Cullen, Development Correspondent.
Trocaire's representative in Honduras, Ms Sally O'Neill, said the situation was "almost indescribable". "You cannot believe the damage done in Tegucigalpa. Entire communities, most of them poor, have been swept away. We have no electricity, no food, petrol has run out and the phones only function in one district."
Ms O'Neill said that in one community in which the aid agency was providing health care, 500 horses were "just swept off the hillside. I met a man with his three-year-old daughter who was dead and wrapped up in a plastic tablecloth. He had just turned back from the morgue which has no power and is stuffed to the ceiling with dead bodies." Trocaire has launched an appeal for the Honduran victims.
In Nicaragua, an APSO (Agency for Personal Service Overseas) representative, Mr Stephen Sexton, said over 6,000 people were confirmed as homeless in his area near Esteli. Temporary shelters were being established in baseball and football stadiums.
Mr Sexton said he believed the local bridge had been swept away in the storm, but when the weather cleared it emerged that the river had simply changed course. APSO's regional director in Central America, Mr Adrian Fitzgerald, described the situation as a "seemingly endless list of tragedy".