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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.
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.
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