November 5, 1998
Honduras's Capital: City of the Dead and the Dazed
Related Articles In Nicaragua's Disaster Zone, a Flow of Human Misery (Nov. 4) Officials Predict Hurricane's Toll Will Exceed 7,000; Corpses Everywhere (Nov. 3) 32 Killed in Major Hurricane, Honduras Says (Oct. 29)
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
EGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- Selvin Joynarid Pérez was standing under the awning of his small house on a bluff overlooking the Choluteca River early Saturday morning, keeping an uneasy watch on the torrential rain and the rising waters below.
Suddenly the earth trembled, he said. He turned to run into the house to wake his wife and 3-year-old daughter. He never made it.
"When I tried to go into the room where my wife and child were sleeping, the earth opened up," he said.
Within seconds, more than 45 houses in the Nueva Esperanza neighborhood slid down the bluff in an avalanche of earth and wood and tin roofing and human beings toward the roiling black waters below, Mr. Pérez, 24, said.
HOW TO ASSIST FLOOD VICTIMS Many aid agencies are accepting contributions to help Central American flood victims. Here is a list of some of them:
American Jewish World Service, 989 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10018, (212) 736-2597.
American Red Cross, International Response Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013. 800-HELP-NOW, or, for Spanish speakers, 800-257-7575.
Baptist World Aid, 6733 Curran St., McClean, Va. 22101-3804. 703-790-8980.
CARE, 151 Ellis Street N.E., Atlanta, Ga. 30303-2426. 800-521-CARE.
Catholic Relief Services, P.O. Box 17090, Baltimore, Md. 21203-7090. 800-235-2772.
Church World Service, 28606 Phillips St., P.O. Box 968, Elkhart, Ind. 46515, (800) 297-1516, ext. 222.
Doctors Without Borders, 6 E. 39th St., New York, N.Y. 10016, (888)392-0392.
Feed the Children, P.O. Box 36, Oklahoma City, Okla., 73101-0036, (800) 627-4556.
Lutheran World Relief, Church St. Station, P.O. Box 6186, New York, N.Y. 10277-1738, (800) 597-5972.
Oxfam America, Central America Relief Fund, 26 West St., Boston, Mass. 02111, (800) 77-O-X-F-A-M.
Quest for Peace, Hurricane Relief Fund, P.O. Box 5206, Hyattsville, Md. 20782, (301) 699-0042.
Salvation Army, World Service Office, 615 Slaters Lane, Alexandria, Va. 22313. 703-684-5528.
Save the Children, P.O. Box 975-M, 54 Wilton Road, Westport, Conn., 06880. 800-243-5075.
United Methodist Committee on Relief, 475 Riverside Dr., Room. 330, New York, N.Y. 10115, (212) 870-3816.
His wife, María, 25, and daughter, Kensi, were crushed to death in their beds.
Today they are still buried in tons of debris above the river, along with at least 11 other people from the neighborhood.
Some family members and survivors were picking over the jumbled boulders and pieces of houses, clawing at the earth in the hope of finding their loved one's remains.
Mr. Pérez, a mechanic, was laboring to repair a road leading to the disaster site so the Government could bring in earthmovers.
Throughout this Central American capital, victims of the floods and landslides spawned over the weekend by Hurricane Mitch were trying to reconstruct their lives, though most had little left besides the clothes they wore and a thin thread of hope.
More than a dozen neighborhoods in this city of 800,000 were erased by floodwaters or buried under landslides.
All over the city, stunned men and women picked through the shattered remains of their homes.
In some places, like the devastated Colonia Soto, hundreds of vultures swirled overhead, apparently attracted by the faint but fetid scent of corpses buried in the rubble created by an avalanche Saturday morning.
Honduran officials said on Tuesday that they had preliminary reports that at least 6,420 people were killed by the storm throughout the country and 5,807 were missing. Some 600,000 are crowded into thousands of temporary shelters because their homes have been destroyed.
"This is the worst," said Delmer Urbizo, the Minister of Government and Justice, who is overseeing the aid operation. "This has no precedent in the history of the country, or even in the history of Central America."
But many officials here say they fear the worst is yet to come. Outbreaks of disease and food shortages are likely unless the roads and other installations can be repaired.
Ninety-three bridges are out along major highways, including 45 that are completely destroyed.
All the major cities in Honduras are like islands, cut off from one another..
Food and gasoline supplies are dwindling, with only a few days worth of both in the capital, officials say.
The roads leading from the capital to the Pacific and Atlantic ports are still impassable.
Vast tracts of the country are still inaccessible except by helicopter, officials said.
Thousands of people are cut off by floodwaters in the northern coastal regions, especially in La Mosquitia in the northeast.
Some are surviving in trees and on top of buildings.
What is worse, officials say, is that many villages and settlements along rivers appear from the air to have been literally wiped off the map.
The floods have also done untold damage to grain, banana, bean and tobacco crops in the San Pedro de Sula valley and other important agricultural areas.
By some estimates, more than 70 percent of the country's crops have been destroyed.
There was sunshine in the capital Wednesday. The river had retreated into its bed, and in many neighborhoods life appeared to be returning to something like its normal rhythm. In Comayaguela, the business district, people were shoveling the mud out of storefronts, removing debris from damaged factories and digging cars and trucks out of banks of earth.
But in dozens of communities swept away by floods or buried in mudslides, working-class people were struggling to come to terms with the disaster.
In La Colonia Soto, residents climbed in disbelief over the wreckage of their former neighborhood, which was nestled between two hills alongside the river.
At least 150 houses were destroyed by a series of landslides.
Most residents had heeded warnings on the radio and had taken shelter on higher ground, but dozens had stayed behind to guard their properties. Most perished, residents said.
The scale of destruction in Soto provokes awe.
An entire soccer field slid down a hill more than 200 yards from its original site and crumpled like a giant sheet of paper, plowing under the houses below. Many houses ended up 150 yards downhill from where they had been built.
Others were buried entirely, some with people inside.
Marco Albarado, a 52-year-old fishmonger, was stacking up boards salvaged from his wrecked home.
He said his family managed to leave for higher ground on Friday afternoon, just hours before an avalanche carried his house down the hill and broke it in pieces.
Looters had stolen what was left of his belongings, he said. He has no way to make a living anymore, because the market with his stall was also destroyed.
"We have nothing," he said, his eyes filling with tears.
A couple of miles upstream, some residents of Nueva Esperanza were still trying to find the bodies of the dead, but their hopes were fading. Several acknowledged that the houses that had rumbled down the bluff had been illegally built in a zone where construction is prohibited.
"The reality of the thing is that it is not the Government's fault," said Florentino Sánchez, who had spent the day digging with his bare hands for the bodies of four children of his cousin. The mother's body was found on Tuesday.
"We never believed the river would do this," he said.