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Search Continues For Felix's Victims As Toll Hits 98

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By BAYARDO MENDOZA and FREDDY CUEVAS, The Associated Press

Published: September 7, 2007

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua - U.S., Honduran and Nicaraguan soldiers searched remote jungle beaches and the open sea Thursday looking for survivors and the dead from Hurricane Felix's rampage.

Villagers in canoes helped, paddling through waters thick with fallen trees.

Two days after the storm hit, 44 more dead were found, raising the known toll to 98, many of them Indians who had tried to flee the Category 5 hurricane.

Officials fear more dead will be found by teams combing the coast stretching across the Nicaragua-Honduras border.

Many people were missing after their village was destroyed and the boats they fled in capsized.

Many of the 52 survivors who were washed ashore or were found clinging to debris were being treated for dehydration in the seaside Honduran village of Villeda Morales.

Rescue and aid was arriving slowly in the impoverished region, where descendants of Indians, European settlers and African slaves live in stilt homes on island reefs and in small hamlets, surviving by fishing and diving for lobster.

The ocean was filled with debris, preventing a rescue mission from going ashore at Sandy Bay, Nicaragua, the village where the eye of Felix made landfall with catastrophic 160 mph winds and a storm surge estimate at 18 feet above normal tides.

From a distance, rescue teams could see fallen palm trees, roofless concrete structures and wooden homes reduced to splinters at Sandy Bay. Women on the shore wept in anguish.
Food and fuel were scarce. Emergency aid was airlifted into the hard-hit regional capital of Puerto Cabezas, a town that is difficult to reach even in good weather.

Throughout the region, people were short of food and fresh water. An AP photographer reached one isolated village where the only thing to drink was the water in fallen coconuts.

The Nicaraguan government said it would need at least $30 million to rebuild.

The U.S. Southern Command sent an amphibious warship, the USS Wasp, to help coordinate American relief efforts. Venezuela also sent aid, and 57 Cuban doctors and nurses on medical missions along the coast pitched in.

Felix developed very quickly over the Caribbean, and Nicaragua posted a hurricane warning less than 24 hours before it hit the coast.

Officials had scrambled to notify the remote, autonomous region where many people have a long mistrust of the Nicaraguan government.

Few realized that the storm would grow to a Category 5 hurricane so quickly, and some who had been warned did not think that it would be so dangerous.

By Thursday, Felix was nothing more than a steady rain in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, but swollen rivers and soggy, unstable mountainsides kept thousands of people from their homes in Central America.

Meanwhile, the remnants of Henriette dumped rain on Arizona and New Mexico. That hurricane hit Mexico on Tuesday near Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula and again on Wednesday near the port of Guaymas, before weakening over the Sonoran desert.

It left 10 dead, including a man who fell while trying to repair his roof. One woman drowned in high surf in Cabo San Lucas, and landslides buried six people in Acapulco.

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