The official death toll from Hurricane Felix has climbed to almost 100 today as soldiers continue to search for survivors and bodies in Honduras and Nicaragua.
The category-five storm slammed into the two countries earlier this week with winds of more than 150mph.
The hurricane devastated Miskito Indian communities living along the coastline that stretches across the Honduran-Nicaraguan border.
The government “didn’t warn us that the hurricane was coming,” said Anali Martinez, 21, whose cousin was among the missing after the Category 5 hurricane hit Tuesday. “That’s why so many were caught in it fishing.”
Abelino Cox, a spokesman for the Regional Emergency Committee, said the death toll from Felix had risen to 98, including two people killed in the village of Sing Sing, 40 miles north of Puerto Cabezas.
Lucia Parista Mora, 43, whose nephew was lobster fishing when the hurricane hit, told The Associated Press that several hundred fishermen and female fish sellers were either on the three main cayes off Puerto Cabezas or in boats fishing.
“We want them to bring them back here,” said Parista Mora. “Even if it is just bones, we want to see them.”
The impoverished region is inhabited by descendants of Indians, European settlers and African slaves who live in stilt homes on island reefs and in small hamlets, surviving by fishing and diving for lobster.
Felix developed very quickly over the warm waters of the southern Caribbean, and Nicaragua posted a hurricane warning less than 24 hours before it hit the coast, scrambling to notify the autonomous northeast where many people have a long-standing mistrust of the Nicaraguan government.
The storm also destroyed the ethnic Zumo and Mayagna Indian community of Awastingni, 55 miles north west of Puerto Cabezas, Cox said. Fourteen members of the jungle community were missing.
Television images showed the Miskito Cayes totally destroyed. All that remained were the trunks of trees that once supported more than 100 primitive dwellings on the barrier islands.
Bodies of Miskito Indians killed by Hurricane Felix floated in the Caribbean off Central America and washed up on beaches yesterday as the death toll from the storm rose to almost 100.
The dead were believed to be from a group of more than 100 Nicaraguan Miskito Indians who sought refuge in canoes when Felix, a giant Category 5 storm that struck the border between Honduras and Nicaragua, roared over them.