Hurricane Felix

Hurricane Felix is bearing down on us today. The rain started at 11am this morning but has not been bad so far. There are no really strong winds yet. The full brunt of the storm is supposed to hit tonight and the newspapers say to plan for at least four days without power. Right now, the town is eerily still and locked down.

Everyone panicked on Monday waking up to the newspaper forecast from Sunday night that there was going to be a Category 5 Felix 25 miles off the coast. As it turns out, Felix is currently overland and has been downgraded to a tropical storm. The grocery store was a madhouse with the shelves picked bare and the lines halfway to the back of the store. All the shops were boarding up their windows and moving their electronics to higher ground. Our family checked into a hotel for 3 nights just so they would have a generator and water. Rasa’s flight back to the States was canceled because the airport closed down for two days. The Peace Corps evacuated all its volunteers to the interior with their passports in hand just in case.

Compared to Hurricane Mitch in 1998 here is what we know. Then, 11,000 people died in 70 inches of rain over 24 hours. Now, Felix is following the same path as Mitch and is forecast to drop 60 inches of rain. The wind will not be the problem this time either. Then, the flooding washed out the roads for two weeks. Now, all the transportation out of La Ceiba is closed down.

Rasa and I rented movies yesterday and are just relaxing in the cool weather today, waiting for the lights to go out. Or not. Here are some pictures:

This is our backyard after a strong downpour of about 30 minutes.

The drainage system for La Ceiba is not planned very well so there are always low points where the water comes back out of the drains.

This is the street in front of our house.

This street runs parallel to the beach, about seven blocks away. Every street in between is the same.

With all that water coming back out of the drains, it brings all the above muck with it. This water is highly contaminated with trash and fecal coliform, which then mixes back in with our drinking water because there is no pressure in those lines to keep out the muck.

This is why we stocked up on water before the storm.