Category 4 Hurricane Iota slams into Nicaragua
By Anna-Catherine Brigida and Anthony Faiola,
MANAGUA, Nicaragua — Hurricane Iota sliced deeper into Central America on Tuesday, as the strongest storm on record this late in the year weakened to a Category 1 with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, leaving a deadly wake of toppled homes, damaged shelters and snapped trees in a region still reeling from Hurricane Eta earlier this month.
Iota’s catastrophic winds and pounding rains made landfall as an extremely intense Category 4 at 10:40 p.m. Monday in northeastern Nicaragua. Authorities announced the storm’s first fatality after a death on the hard-hit Colombian island of Providencia, with a population of more than 5,000 some 140 miles east of the Nicaraguan coast.
Iota came ashore only 15 miles south of where Eta made landfall earlier this month, on Nov. 3.
Addressing his nation from the Caribbean city of Cartagena, Colombian President Iván Duque said 98 percent of the island’s infrastructure was damaged or destroyed after Iota, then a Category 5, pummeled Providencia before striking the Central American coast.
The island appeared to suffer catastrophic damage. Authorities were scrambling to clear its main airport for aid flights, as the Colombian navy dispatched a frigate from the mainland carrying emergency first responders and a helicopter for search and rescue missions, as well as supplies of tents, blankets, portable beds, food kits and water.
“For the first time in history, we’ve seen a Category 5 hurricane hit our country,” Duque said. He said the government was preparing a major aid lift to the island, where downed power lines have cut off electricity.
Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast awoke Tuesday to toppled homes and uprooted trees.
Footage from Telemundo in the coastal port of Puerto Cabezas showed partial damage to some homes. Residents warned that packed shelters were running out of supplies and that transportation through the streets was impossible. Images on local media outlets showed strong winds and rains blowing debris down streets.
On Monday night, roofs blew off shelters where many evacuated residents were housed, causing the Red Cross to stage emergency relocations as heavy rains and winds thrashed around them.
Towering waves nearly 20 feet high crashed down on the coast, flooding streets and filling them with debris.
Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo said 40,000 people across the country were evacuated before the hurricane struck. In his first statement since Eta slammed into Nicaragua on Nov. 3, President Daniel Ortega issued a call for aid.
“Almost the entire country is in a national emergency, because it has been one hurricane after another, and this impacts all of Central America,” Ortega said, according to state media.
[Hurricane Iota: Images capture the Category 5 storm’s ferocity]
Such powerful storms so late in hurricane season are exceedingly rare, and two back-to-back slamming into nearly the same spots unheard of.
Leo Henriquez Romero, 24, a fisherman in the mainly Indigenous community of Wawa Bar about 10 miles south of Puerto Cabezas, saw his wood-frame home washed away by Eta, with his family losing their clothes, television and small savings. Late Monday, he, his wife and young child were holed up with a local reverend, who had turned his cement home into an impromptu shelter.
Even there, they were not safe.
“We can feel the wind,” he said by phone. “It wants to take the roof off. I can hear that it’s now loose.”
In Puerto Cabezas, about 30 miles north of where storm’s made landfall, eyewitnesses said strong winds were bending coconut palms and that lower-lying areas had started to flood by late Monday afternoon, prompting more residents to scramble toward overcrowded and undersupplied shelters in a poverty-stricken corner of the country. Parts of the port town of 50,000 had already lost power.
AFP/Getty Images
A man rides his bicycle in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on Monday as Hurricane Iota — upgraded to Category 5 — moves over the Caribbean toward the Nicaragua-Honduras border.
“The winds, the rain, are very strong. I can hear the sound of the sea surrounding us,” said Shira Downs, a Puerto Cabezas resident and director of a woman’s rights organization. “This is going to be worse that Eta, and this is just the beginning. I just hope God has mercy on us.”
José Coleman, an Indigenous activist in Puerto Cabezas, said winds had blown the wood siding off a neighborhood house, leaving it partially collapsed. His brother, Presly Coleman, said that by Monday morning it was already too dangerous to leave the house.
“It’s very strong,” Presly Coleman said. “The winds are whipping.”
Thousands of people in the storm’s path had already evacuated from Eta and were still sheltering inland when Iota hit. But thousands of others, many of them impoverished Indigenous and Afro-Nicaraguans, remained on the ground and in Iota’s path, with the hardest-hit areas forecast to receive up to 30 inches of rain.
The hurricanes hit the region at a time when it is already struggling not only from the aftermath of Eta, but from the socioeconomic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, which is compounding poverty and food insecurity in the region.
AFP/Getty Images
A man walks at the beach in El Muelle neighborhood in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on Monday as Hurricane Iota moves over the Caribbean toward the Nicaragua-Honduras border.
[Hurricane Iota explosively intensifies to Category 5 as it bears down on Nicaragua]
Nicaraguan authorities estimated that 80,000 families will be affected by Iota, both in coastal communities where the hurricane will hit directly and in other parts of the country that could experience flooding and deadly landslides.
The government has prepared nearly 1,300 shelters, according Nicaragua’s National System for the Prevention, Mitigation and Attention of Disasters .
Some residents in areas previously hit by Eta told Nicaraguan media they didn’t want to evacuate their homes now because they feared looting if they abandoned them.
Vittoria Peñalba, director of sustainability for the aid group World Vision in Nicaragua, said 50,000 coastal dwellers had been evacuated over the weekend and on Monday, a process hampered by roads washed out and bridges pulverized in Eta’s wake.
AFP/Getty Images
A girl is seen in a small house in front of the beach in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on Monday as Hurricane Iota moves over the Caribbean toward the Nicaragua-Honduras border.
In Nicaragua, a troubled Central American nation of 6.5 million where Ortega’s authoritarian government has come under fire for poor handling of the pandemic, concern centered heavily on the destructive force of Iota in northeastern towns of Puerto Cabezas, Waspam and, farther south, Prinzapolka. There was overcrowding in shelters lacking food, mattresses and personal protective equipment.
“The houses on the coast are mostly made from wood — they are of very fragile construction — so people are going to schools, shelters, anywhere they can be protected from the wind and rain,” Peñalba said. “But there are too many people in each shelter. The government is trying its best, but there’s too many people.”
[Dozens dead and villages submerged days after Typhoon Vamco pummels the Philippines]
Before making landfall, Iota pummeled the small Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia, located east of the Nicaraguan coast. Early Monday, communications went down on Providencia, a tropical island between Jamaica and Costa Rica, according to Colombian news outlets. Duque, the Colombian president, said later Monday that regular communications had also been lost with San Andrés, population 80,000, leaving the government to rely on links via satellite phone.
The Colombian outlet Semana TV showed video footage of San Andrés, with power lines downed on flooded roads and corrugated iron roofs blown off homes.
“This is a big challenge our country is facing,” Duque said in televised comments. “As soon as the circumstances allow us to get there, we will do that with all our capacity.”
AFP/Getty Images
A woman and a boy remain in their damaged houses in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on Monday as Hurricane Iota approaches.
On the Colombian islands, Twitter became the main source of communication, with media outlets and government institutions posting videos of the most-affected areas. The Colombian navy tweeted footage of a 67-year-old Italian sailor found adrift off the coast of San Andrés.
“Thank you to the Colombian navy,” says the man in the video, whose name was not disclosed.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami showed Iota losing strength into Tuesday while tracking toward more densely population centers in Honduras, where devastating mudslides from Eta have already left more than 100 dead.
In Honduras, which suffered the worst of the fatalities from Eta, the military evacuated 730 residents from the inundated community of Villeda Morales. Images posted on the army’s official Twitter site showed soldiers carrying children and aiding the elderly through knee-deep waters.
[Hurricane Eta makes landfall in Nicaragua as a fierce Category 4 storm]
Maite Matheu, Honduras director for the charity Care, said storm conditions had already begun hitting parts of that country. Concern centered on an estimated 100,000 people who were fleeing their homes, including in forced evacuations imposed on Monday by the government.
“The problem is the shelters are already full because of Eta,” she said.
Matheu said groups were particularly fearful about the impact in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, with high concentrations of people living in areas prone to flooding, and in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, where storm refugees from Eta were already living precariously on the streets.
“There have not really been preparations for everyone to go to shelters,” she said. “An emergency is coming.”
Faiola reported from Miami. Ana Vanessa Herrero in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.
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