Families had tried to repair their roofs after Eta, even in a temporary way, to escape the regular tropical rains, but Iota would finish with all of that, he said. Those who had wells have seen them contaminated by seawater and sewage from primitive latrines. Many families depend on captured rain, but Eta destroyed their systems catching and piping the rainwater. “We can’t talk about partial damage, but rather total,” he said. He said the primary concerns for people trying to survive after Eta were drinking water and shelter.Įta left no structure in the coastal community of Wawa Bar untouched. “We will never forget this year.”Ĭairo Jarquin, Nicaragua emergency response project manager for Catholic Relief Services, was just in the area last Friday where Iota made landfall. “There are already a lot of houses that lost their roofs, fences and fruit trees that got knocked down,” said Bermudez. “This hurricane is definitely worse” than Eta, Jason Bermudez, a university student from Bilwi, said as winds roared before Iota came ashore. Hurricane Iota off the coast of Cartagena de Indias caused a tidal surge that flooded the Marlinda sector and la Boquilla, in Cartagena, Colombia “The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Iota is making landfall in almost the exact same location that category 4 Hurricane Eta did a little less than two weeks ago,” the Hurricane Center said in a statement.Įta killed more than 130 people in the region as torrential rains caused flash floods and mudslides in parts of Central America and Mexico. Eta’s torrential rains saturated the soil in the region, leaving it prone to new deadly landslides and floods, forecasters warned. Iota came ashore just 24km (15 miles) south of where Hurricane Eta made landfall on November 3, also as a Category 4 hurricane. “This is coming in with fury,” said Artola Schultz.

“This is double destruction,” he said, referring to the damage wrought by Hurricane Eta just two weeks earlier. “It is like bullets,” he said of the sound of metal structures banging and buckling in the wind. People had hunkered down in Bilwi even before the hurricane arrived, already battered by screeching winds and torrential rains.īusiness owner Adan Artola Schultz braced himself in the doorway of his house as strong gusts of wind and rain drove water in torrents down the street. Nicaragua’s meteorology director Marcio Baca said the area was forecast to receive 150-180mm (6-7 inches) of rainfall and soils were already highly saturated. The Tola River had topped its banks and western Nicaragua, along the Pacific coast, were forecast to receive the most rain. He said one hotel in Bilwi had lost its entire roof.Īs the storm moved westward, flooding became the concern. More than 40,000 people were in shelters. Guillermo Gonzalez, director of Nicaragua’s emergency management agency, said on Tuesday morning that preliminary reports from the coast included fallen trees, electric poles and roofs stripped from homes, but no deaths or injuries. People evacuating before Hurricane Iota makes landfall in San Manuel Cortes, Honduras

The storm was forecast to cross southern Honduras late on Tuesday. It was moving westward at 19kmph (12mph).

On Tuesday morning, Iota still carried hurricane-force winds as a Category 1 storm, moving inland over northern Nicaragua with maximum sustained winds of 120kmph (75mph). It hit the coast about 48km (30 miles) south of the Nicaraguan city of Puerto Cabezas, also known as Bilwi. Iota had intensified into an extremely dangerous Category 5 hurricane on Monday, but the US National Hurricane Center said it weakened as it neared the coast later in the day and made landfall with maximum sustained winds of 250kmph (155mph). In a one-two punch, Hurricane Iota roared ashore along almost exactly the same stretch of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast recently devastated by an equally powerful hurricane and then weakened as it tore across the northern part of the country.

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