![]() ![]() ![]() Similar heavy rain and flooding occurred in Venezuela’s Falcon state in the Paraguana Peninsula, leaving 288 homes damaged. Virgin Islands picked up a 2-day storm total of 4.37 inches, while San Juan, Puerto Rico, measured 3.51 inches during the same time. and British Virgin Islands, Vieques, and Puerto Rico on November 10th and 11th. Facing little resistance once away from an unfavorable environment aloft and dry air, Iota strengthened into a hurricane on November 15 and a major hurricane up until landfall on November 16.Įven before Iota was a depression, it packed heavy rain and flash flooding across the U.S. Six hours later, it was given the name Iota, becoming the 30th and final named storm of the 2020 season. Iota packed devastating impacts along its path into Central America, even flooding a few eastern Caribbean Islands before organizing.Īfter trudging across the wide-open Atlantic for days, the tropical wave finally intensified into a tropical depression in the eastern Caribbean Sea early on November 13. The World Food Programme said millions of people in Central America already urgently needed food assistance in the wake of Eta and that it had transported nearly 300 tonnes of food to affected villages in Nicaragua.Ĭlimate change is increasing the intensity of both rain and droughts across Central America, United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said last week, saying such phenomena can exacerbate the poverty which drives people to flee their homes.The 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season was the most active on record, and the season’s final storm would be the cherry on top of the ice cream. The unprecedented 2020 hurricane season comes as Central America is facing an economic crisis linked to the coronavirus pandemic, with experts warning the compounding hardship could worsen infections, spread hunger, and fuel a new round of migration from the region. “The biggest problem we have right now is that we don’t have fuel to keep on evacuating people” on boats, Wood said.ĭouglas Espinal, emergency services chief in nearby Puerto Lempira, said fuel shortages stemmed from evacuation and rescue efforts during the earlier storm, which went on to dump rain across a large swath of Central America, destroying crops and killing dozens in landslides and flooding.Įspinal said a little extra fuel had arrived on Sunday, allowing him to make some evacuation runs, and that villagers were also making their own way to seek shelter in Puerto Lempira. “There are villages that can protect or save themselves, but others cannot cope with this catastrophe after Eta,” said Teonela Wood, mayor of Honduras’ Brus Laguna municipality, which she said was home to more than 17,000 people. Local authorities and the navy frantically tried to get thousands of families to higher ground or ports in the watery region of jungles, rivers and coastline, which also straddles Honduras and took a direct hit from Eta. The World Food Programme warned that some 80,000 people in Nicaragua were at risk from Iota, while Honduran authorities said they were evacuating another 80,000. The Miskito people are descendants of indigenous groups and Africans believed to have escaped from shipwrecked slave ships. The hurricane was located about 100 miles east-south-east of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua in the Miskito region after whipping past the Colombian islands of San Andres and Providencia before dawn. In El Salvador, the government declared a “red alert” ahead of Iota, suspending school and activating emergency funding. ![]() Iota was due to collide with north-eastern Nicaragua overnight and was packing maximum sustained winds of 160mph, reaching category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.īarely recovering after Hurricane Eta hit two weeks ago, Guatemala and southern Mexico were also bracing for renewed flooding on land already waterlogged from the earlier storm. The official end of hurricane season is 30 November. Remnants of Theta, the 29th, dissipated on Sunday in the eastern Atlantic. Eta was this year’s 28th named storm, tying the 2005 record. ![]()
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