September 7, 2007
Hurricane Felix Leaves Trail of Death
in Nicaragua
Managua
Tearful children holding on to their mothers and anxious faces
awaiting news of the missing are prevalent the Nicaraguan city of
Puerto Cabezas in the wake of the deadly Hurricane Felix.
The storm left 46 people dead, more than 100 people missing and
destroyed the property of more than 40,000 others in the Central
American nation, an official report said Thursday.
"I no longer have anything. My house has been torn to the ground,
everything is destroyed," an indigenous woman said.
She appealed for help from Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on
Wednesday as he toured the areas of the country's Caribbean coast
most affected by Felix.
Uprooted trees whose trunks and branches fell on wooden houses,
roofless buildings and people searching for their loved ones
dominated the scene Thursday in Bilwi, the indigenous name for
Puerto Cabezas - a city of 60,000 on the Caribbean, some 580 km
north of the capital Managua.
In order to allow urgent access to international aid, Ortega decreed
a state of disaster in the marginalized and impoverished area, where
the cyclone struck in full force early Tuesday.
Civil Defence spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Alvaro Rivas told
reporters Thursday that 24 of the 46 confirmed dead were indigenous
people from Miskito communities whose bodies were found floating off
neighbouring Honduras' southern Caribbean coast.
Honduran authorities rescued 25 Nicaraguans who had shipwrecked in
the Miskito Cays area, on the maritime border between the two
countries, Rivas said.
But many others were still missing.
"My brother and his family were taken by the wind, they are lost," a
man shouted as he sought help in regional government offices.
He said his relatives had refused to leave their home in the
devastated town of Sandy Bay, for fear of losing their scarce
property.
Blankets and food have barely started to make their way to the
region from Managua, leaving young mothers to use their own clothes
to cover their hungry babies in 101 shelters set up in schools and
churches in the area with a high Miskito indigenous population.
"We are going to rebuild all your homes," Ortega's influential wife
Rosario Murillo said.
The presidential couple met a US Army Chinook helicopter carrying
humanitarian aid Wednesday at Bilwi's devastated airport.
Preliminary government figures show almost 9,000 houses were damaged
by Felix, with close to 8,000 of them totally destroyed. The
hurricane destroyed 90 percent of the infrastructure in Puerto
Cabezas, including power and telephone lines. So, residents remain
without electricity or communications with the outside world.
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