Storm Kills 142 in Central America
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) -- Flooding and landslides from the season's first tropical storm have killed at least 142 people and left thousands homeless in Central America, officials said Monday.
Dozens of people are still missing and emergency crews are struggling to reach isolated communities cut off by washed-out roads and collapsed bridges caused by Tropical Storm Agatha.
The sun emerged Monday in hardest-hit Guatemala, where officials reported 118 dead and 53 missing. In the department of Chimaltenango -- a province west of Guatemala City -- landslides buried dozens of rural Indian communities and killed at least 60 people, Gov. Erick de Leon said.
''The department has collapsed,'' de Leon said. ''There are a lot of dead people. The roads are blocked. The shelters are overflowing. We need water, food, clothes, blankets -- but above all, money.''
In the tiny village of Parajbei, a slide smothered three homes and killed 11 people.
''It was raining really hard and there was a huge noise,'' said Vicente Azcaj, 56, who ran outside and saw that a hill had crumbled. ''Now everyone is afraid that the same will happen to their homes.''
Volunteers from nearby villages worked nonstop since Sunday to recover the bodies in Parajbei, and on Monday they found the last two: brothers, 4 and 8 years old, who were buried under tons of dirt, rocks and trees.
As a thank-you, rescuers got a plate of rice and beans from the mayor of nearby Santa Apolonia.
''It's a small thing, but it comes from the heart,'' Tulio Nunez told them through a translator.
Nunez said he worried about the well-being of survivors in the area because the landslides blocked roads and burst water pipes.
''They don't have anything to drink,'' he said.
In all some 110,000 people were evacuated in Guatemala.
Thousands more have fled their homes in neighboring Honduras, where the death toll rose to 15 even as meteorologists predicted three more days of rain.
Two dams near the capital of Tegucigalpa overflowed into a nearby river, and officials warned people to stay away from swollen waterways.
''The risk is enormous,'' Mayor Ricardo Alvarez said.
In El Salvador, at least 179 landslides have been reported and 11,000 people were evacuated. The death toll was nine, President Mauricio Funes said.
About 95 percent of the country's roads were affected by landslides, but most remain open, Transportation Minister Gerson Martinez said.
The Lempa River, which flows to the Pacific, topped its banks and flooded at least 20 villages, affecting some 6,000 people, said Jorge Melendez, director of the Civil Protection Agency.
Officials warned that the Acelhuate River, which cuts through San Salvador, was running at dangerously high levels and threatened to spill over into the capital's streets.
Agatha made landfall near the Guatemala-Mexico border Saturday as a tropical storm with winds up to 45 mph (75 kph). It dissipated the following day over the mountains of western Guatemala.
The rising death toll is reminding nervous residents of Hurricane Mitch, which hovered over Central America for days in 1998, causing flooding and mudslides that killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than 8,000 missing and unaccounted for.
Rescue efforts in Guatemala have been complicated by a volcanic eruption Thursday near the capital that blanketed parts of the area with ash and closed the country's main airport. Officials are now allowing helicopters and propeller planes to take off, but commercial flights remain grounded.
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Associated Press writers Freddy Cuevas in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Diego Mendez in San Salvador, El Salvador, contributed to this report.
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Update, 2pm PT: HOW TO HELP, after the jump. Above, this photo just posted to the Guatemalan Government's Flickr feed shows a massive, spontaneous sinkhole ("hundimiento") that appeared today in Zone 2 of Guatemala City, after overwhelming saturation of rains from tropical storm Agatha. Not Photoshop, sadly: these happen from time to time during major storms in part because of unstable geology (and bad urban engineering—read more about it in the comments). There are rumors of similar sinkholes now forming nearby. See it on Google Maps. (News reports: Prensa Libre, and blogs)
Guatemala is in a state of crisis today after twin natural calamities struck: First, on May 27 the Pacaya volcano (just 19 miles from the capital) woke up in a bad mood. Lava flowed, black sand and rock and ash spewed everywhere. A newscaster covering the news near the volcano was killed by flying rocks.Two days later on May 29, tropical storm "Agatha" struck, destroying homes, causing floods, and creating tens of thousands of internally displaced. Infrastructure in this country—where the majority live in poverty—is very poor, and ill-equipped to handle such a double blow. As of last night, official numbers on storm: about 30,000 "refugees," close to 120,000 evacuated, 93 dead and rising. Guatemala's one international airport has been has been closed for days, and just as it prepares to reopen today, there's word of new volcanic activity.
The poor always suffer the most when events like this happen, and the two events together caused surreal conditions: knee-deep black sand mud, and "instant concrete" that forms when rain meets ash, clogging up drains and fragile sewage systems. Said a friend on Twitter, "Water and sand everywhere... it's like the beach, only a lot less fun."
Today I learned that in the rural K'iche Maya pueblo where I volunteer with a non-profit, a local committee of community leaders is organizing to walk to other villages in the region, and check on damage, injuries, casualties. In rural areas, phones still aren't working, and many communities are only accessible by foot.
Guatemala isn't the only Central American nation affected: at least 10 are dead in El Salvador, and Honduras has declared a state of emergency.
Inset above, an image from the Guatemalan government's Flickr feed, of a child evacuated from a village near the volcano.
Here are documents related to the disaster (in Spanish). Reading and photos, and a guide to Twitter accounts and hashtags: Antigua Daily News, "Stop, Agatha, Stop!" And here's an item by Juliana Rincón Parra in Global Voices.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Renata Avila of Global Voices in Guatemala says,
I think that the best way to help now is to save the energy to help later: after the storm I am pretty sure we will face a nutrition crisis again because of lost crops and also a titanic task to rebuild communities. But if someone wants to donate in kind stuff here are the list of centers collecting items, and people can donate to untechoparamipais.org. These kids are amazing and are NOT corrupt.I second the understanding that food crisis is imminent, and the best place to focus a desire to help. I traded texts with the K'iche village yesterday, and word is that most of the corn crops were devastated throughout that part of the highlands. I'd expect similar throughout the land. We're talking about a nation in which a large number of indigenous communities are still subsistence maize farmers, and Guatemala was already in the middle of an economic crisis and a hunger crisis—the success or failure of a corn crop can be a matter of life or death.
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