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Floods and houses blown up are reported after the ravages of Iota in the last 24 hours.
– It’s flooded everywhere. It has been raining most of the night, Marcelo Herrera, mayor of Wampusirpi in northeastern Honduras, told Reuters.
– We need food and water for the population, because Eta took our crops, he continues.
Many people are missing in Honduras because some of the most affected areas have not yet been reached, and in Nicaragua, Panama and the Colombian island of Providencia there have been nine deaths so far. In Providencia, with a population of 6,000 inhabitants, practically all the infrastructure has been destroyed.
The eye of Hurricane Iota approached in Nicaragua on Monday night, local time. With winds of around 70 meters per second, it is the strongest hurricane recorded to date in the country. It came just two weeks after Etta’s devastating advance into the region, which claimed the lives of up to 200 people.
This is the first time since measurements began that two such large hurricanes have formed across the Atlantic in November. Puerto Cabezas, a coastal city in Nicaragua, was still in ruins, partially flooded, after Eta, when Iota struck.
– We can die. There is nothing to eat, Inocencia Smith, who has taken refuge in an evacuation center in the city, told Reuters.
About 100,000 people in Nicaragua and Honduras they are evacuated, according to the authorities. The Red Cross warns that new floods after Iota could lead to disaster, as the ground is already completely soaked.
“We are very concerned about the risk of fatal landslides in these areas as the land is already completely saturated,” Red Cross spokesman Matthew Cochrane said Tuesday.
Although the hurricane has diminished in strength and has now been downgraded to a tropical storm, there is still an imminent risk of catastrophic flooding and landslides, as more than 70 centimeters of rain is expected in some areas.
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