Officials Fear 7,000 Deaths in Aftermath of Hurricane

Amid fears that the death count from tropical storm Mitch could exceed 7,000, Central Americans on Monday began digging their way out of the worst natural disaster to hit their countries in more than two decades.

Rescue operations continued in Honduras and elsewhere for people stranded on rooftops and in trees when torrential rains from Mitch knocked out bridges, covered highways and flooded valleys with muddy water.

The storm, once the fourth-strongest hurricane to appear in the Caribbean, seemed to be breaking up over Guatemala. It left behind destruction that could not yet be measured, as rescue workers struggled to find survivors and bodies in villages covered by mountains of mud in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Yet even without final figures, officials said they knew Mitch had been a calamity on a grand scale, comparable to the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, that left 5,000 dead, or to Hurricane Fifi, which killed at least 2,000 Hondurans in 1974.

“Honduras has been mortally wounded,” President Carlos Flores said in a nationally televised broadcast.

“There are no undamaged zones or unharmed towns,” he said, pleading for international aid. “We cannot support those who were harmed with [help from] those who escaped damage. . . . This is beyond pride or shame.”

In the same broadcast, authorities announced a curfew between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. to control looting, along with limits on gasoline sales to conserve fuel.

Both Nicaragua and Honduras declared three days of national mourning. Residents of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, where one in three houses was destroyed, called in to national television shows to vent their grief before the funeral of popular Mayor Cesar Castellanos, whose helicopter crashed Sunday while flying over damaged areas of the city.

Dimas Alfonso, operations chief for the Honduras National Emergency Committee, said in a radio interview that as many as 5,000 people were feared dead in this country.

In Nicaragua, the Red Cross reported that 808 people were confirmed dead and that 2,190 had disappeared. As many as 1,500 people were probably killed in a mudslide that buried four northwestern hamlets, Vice President Enrique Bolanos said in a televised address late Sunday.

The storm left 148 people dead in El Salvador; 106 more were missing. The heaviest losses were in the eastern part of that country, where 1,500 residents remained isolated Monday because of fallen bridges and washed-out roads.

Red Cross officials pegged the cost of disaster relief for the region at $7.4 million. That is in addition to the billions of dollars in damage to crops, infrastructure and industry.

In Washington, President Clinton said the U.S. would provide $2 million in food, medicine, water and other emergency supplies.

Flores estimated that 70% of Honduras’ agricultural crops had been destroyed.

“Bananas, coffee, watermelons and basic grains are all lost,” he said. The government was asking farmers to report their losses in order to compile national figures more precise than the initial damage estimate of $3 billion.

Nicaragua calculated losses of $25 million in roads and bridges alone, without counting crop destruction.

“We still do not know the magnitude, but it is considerable,” said Gilberto Cuadra, former president of the Private Enterprise Council, that country’s top business organization.

Cattle, rice, onions and cut flowers for export all have been wiped out, Cuadra said.

“If roads are not opened soon, we will also lose all the coffee,” he said. The storm struck just before the beginning of the coffee harvest, which produces one of the region’s major exports.

“The rain and wind probably knocked the coffee off the bushes,” said Maria Elena Escalante of the Union of Salvadoran Coffee Cooperatives. Still, she added, “I do not think it will be a total loss.”

By Monday, the region was already experiencing food shortages and price gouging. Bean prices had doubled in Managua’s central market, and vegetables had disappeared from the shelves as desperate shoppers bought everything available at inflated prices.

Uriel Antonio Ruiz said in a telephone interview from the village of Somoto in northern Nicaragua, which had been cut off by damaged roads, that shopkeepers there were refusing to sell food and were keeping it for their own future needs.

“The biggest worry is what will happen in the days to come,” said Alexander Siliezar, a director of the Salvadoran Industrialists Assn. “What are these people who lost their houses going to do?”

Special correspondents Aracely Acosta in Managua and Diego Aleman in San Salvador contributed to this report.

* A HELPING HAND: Several agencies are accepting donations for flood relief. E3