98 Dead as Storm Fades Into Pacific : Nicaragua Catches Hurricane’s Brunt; 300,000 Homeless

Hurricane Joan blew out of Central America into the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, after killing at least 98 people in six days and five countries and causing what President Daniel Ortega called “the greatest losses Nicaragua has suffered as a result of a natural catastrophe.”

Hundreds were injured in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America and scores were missing. About 300,000 were reported to be at least temporarily homeless in this country alone.

Nicaragua caught the brunt of the storm, and Ortega put the death toll in his country at 50, adding that the figure is expected to rise.

Many Areas Isolated

“There are a great many isolated zones where we still don’t know what’s happening,” he said.

Neighboring Costa Rica counted 18 dead, 175 injured, 18 missing and 7,500 people homeless. About 55,000 Costa Ricans were evacuated from their homes, and other thousands were left without electric power or drinking water, according to that country’s National Emergency Commission. Panama blamed four deaths on the storm, which earlier in the week had claimed 26 lives in Venezuela and Colombia.

As it blew across the relatively narrow Central American isthmus, Joan weakened to the level of a tropical storm and then to that of a tropical depression, but it picked up strength again as it crossed over waters of the Pacific and was renamed Tropical Storm Miriam.

By Sunday evening, Miriam was about 50 miles southeast of San Salvador with maximum sustained winds of 55 m.p.h., the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

Evacuations Ordered

In El Salvador, the government declared a nationwide state of emergency, and evacuations were ordered in flood-prone areas.

President Ortega said that nine people were killed and 55 others were seriously injured in Bluefields, a town of 38,000 people on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, where the storm first came ashore early Saturday with hurricane-force winds of 135 m.p.h.

Alejandro Belli, a Nicaraguan producer for CBS Television who was in Bluefields during the hurricane, said that “the town was flattened,” with no more than 100 of its estimated 6,000 houses still standing after 10 hours of intense pounding by Joan’s winds.

Film brought back by Belli’s crew showed streets cluttered with uprooted trees, downed electric wires, dead birds, debris from splintered wooden houses, shorn-off tin roofs and wrecked automobiles. Bluefields was still without electric power, running water and its only radio station Sunday.

Cornel Lagrouw, a Dutch cameraman for CBS, said the town’s newly renovated two-story Hotel Caribbean and its hospital were intact but that most of the hospital’s roof blew away. He watched two injured survivors of the storm undergo surgery in roofless operating rooms Saturday.

Sandinista authorities offered about 45 fishing boats to evacuate the town but got enough takers to fill just 30, Belli said. Sandinista officials said 4,378 people moved inland, leaving most townsfolk behind to care for their flimsy wooden houses. “They just didn’t believe the hurricane could be that bad,” Belli said.

Several thousand people scurried into 10 schools, churches and other shelters only after the winds began to pick up around midnight Friday, Belli said.

The first planeloads of relief aid--44 tons of rice, beans and powdered milk--arrived Sunday in Managua from Cuba aboard seven Cuban and Nicaraguan air force planes. The supplies were trucked to coastal people who jammed refugee centers in Juigalpa, 100 miles east of Managua.

Ortega said that the water rose 30 feet over the docks at the port of Rama on the Escondido River inland from Bluefields at the end of the country’s East-West Highway, blocking land-river transportation from Managua to the Caribbean coast.

“We are going to need a lot of material from abroad, especially roofing material,” Ortega told reporters here. “We don’t know how many houses have to be rebuilt. In Bluefields, everything has to be rebuilt. In the Corn Islands (about 40 miles offshore), not a house remains. There is also heavy destruction in (the towns of) Rama, Nueva Guinea and San Carlos.”

Worse Than Earthquake

According to Ortega, the storm caused greater material losses in this country than an earthquake that struck Managua in December, 1972, destroying the center of the capital and claiming an estimated 10,000 lives.

Planning Minister Alejandro Martinez Cuenca said he feared heavy flood damage to the nation’s vital coffee, rice, banana and cotton crops. He said that wind destroyed the silo of the Juan Manuel Laredo rice mill in San Carlos, in the far south of the country. The mill had been inaugurated just three weeks ago and was one of the country’s largest.

Ortega spoke of the storm’s devastation while making a jeep tour Sunday of flooded neighborhoods in Managua, where 64,000 people spent the night in emergency shelters. With Ortega were his brother, Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, and top army officials.

The capital’s mayor, Carlos Carrion, said that most of the people in the shelters had returned to find their homes habitable.

Joan passed over Managua shortly after midnight as a weakened tropical storm. Carrion said that sustained winds were 25 m.p.h. in the capital, with gusts up to 50 m.p.h.

A daylight tour of the capital showed a lot of trees knocked down, some having damaged houses. In Acagualinca, on Managua’s lake front, floodwater racing through a drainage canal ripped away 100 yards of retaining wall and washed away parts of three houses.

As the storm began to blow in Managua on Saturday evening, winds downed electrical wires, sending sparks flying in the dark. Because of the danger that posed, residents telephoned the official Voice of Nicaragua radio station, demanding that all lights be cut off. By 7 p.m. most of the capital was darkened. The lights were still off Sunday, apparently because of downed lines.

Children Secured to Tree

In Tisma, a town just north of here, Vilma Jarquin tied her two sons, 6 and 8 years old, to a tree to keep them from blowing away. They were freed by civil defense workers, but only after the mother put up a struggle.

Mayor Carrion, who is in charge of the whole Managua region, commented: “People have never lived through a hurricane. They didn’t have the slightest idea what to do.”

Many poor people in Managua credited the government with good civil defense work.

“We didn’t know where to go or what to do,” said Lucrecia Ordonez, 38, who spent the night in a church in Managua and returned to find her home flooded.

She said that Interior Minister Tomas Borge had personally toured her lake-front neighborhood to persuade people to leave.

Ortega was accosted on his Sunday tour by hundreds of poor Managuans who survived the storm but demanded food.

“Why don’t you bring a truckload of milk and rice and beans in here? We are starving!” Margarita Aleman, a mother of eight children in the San Francisco de las Torres neighborhood, shouted at the president.