PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua Doctors treated storm casualties in a makeshift clinic Wednesday after then-Hurricane Felix flooded their hospital and wrecked villages on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. The death toll rose to at least 18 with dozens more missing.
Far to the northwest, Hurricane Henriette plowed into Mexico for the second time in two days, making landfall near the port city of Guaymas with top sustained winds of 75 mph. Seven deaths were reported from the Pacific storm, which hit Baja California on Tuesday.
Felix came ashore early Tuesday in Nicaragua as a dangerous Category 5 tempest packing 160 mph winds and heavy rains that caused mudslides, destroyed homes, uprooted trees and devastated villages.
Wednesday night, Nicaraguan Civil Defense Department spokesman Alvaro Rivas said the confirmed death toll had doubled to 18. He said more than 50 people were missing in the Matagalpa province in the north and another 10 missing around hard-hit city of Puerto Cabezas.
The dead included a man who drowned when his boat capsized, a woman killed when a tree fell on her house and a newborn who died shortly after birth because her mother couldn’t get medical attention.
Among the missing were four fishermen whose small sailboat sank as Felix’s center passed overhead. A survivor, Fernando Pereira, 24, said he clung to a piece of wood for 12 hours, despite a dislocated shoulder, and washed ashore at the village of Sandy Bay only hours after Felix made landfall there. He hadn’t seen his friends since.
“I felt horrible,” he said. “I was drinking salt water, and I thought I was going to die.”
Others were caught in the sea as well. Jelivaro Climax, 22, said he had to swim through enormous waves to reach shore.
“Lightning flashed through a pitch black sky,” he said. “I don’t know how I survived. I swam with everything I had, and I was sure the sea would take me.”
Before it weakened to a tropical depression early Wednesday, Felix swept over the Miskito Coast, an impoverished region where about 150,000 people live in jungle settlements. Their hamlets of wooden shacks and coconut groves are remote even in good weather, reachable only by air or flat-bottom boats.
The Miskitos, descendants of Indians, European settlers and African slaves, live semiautonomously, much like people on Indian reservations in the U.S.
Teresa Flores, 34, rode out the storm at a neighbor’s house after her wooden home collapsed, injuring her husband and 3-year-old son.
“They took the clothes, even the barrels where we keep water,” she said. “Now we have nothing to drink. We lost all our food, the television set, the microwave, even the toilet. Nothing works. We are pretty much in the street.”
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