Mudslide hits sheltering Guatemalans, 80 dead
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-10-11 14:05

A landslide in western Guatemala that destroyed two churches and killed 80 people sheltering from fierce weather has emerged as the latest tragedy from Hurricane Stan to strike Central America.

Efrain Hernandez, mayor of the town of Tacana on the Mexican border, told Reuters on Monday a torrent of mud loosened by rains had struck a poor neighborhood on Thursday.

"My house is there but my family is not," cried Nelson Raymond, 18, whose mother, father and aunt died. He covered his grief-wracked face with a baseball cap.

The town, in the shadow of the 13,400-feet (4,093-meter) Tacana volcano, had been cut off from the rest of the country for days by mud-clogged roads. Thick clouds prevented helicopters from landing.

Emergency workers, spurred on by earlier reports that several thousand people may have died in the mudslide, only reached the area on Monday. They were led by a team of Guatemalan firefighters in bright red uniforms.

Fearing flash floods and mudslides, people had crowded into the two churches, one Protestant and one Catholic, in the town's Cua area. Some 30 homes were also destroyed.

"I was getting ready to go to the shelter when I heard this noise. First it was silence and then suddenly it was as if the hill was exploding," said Rosa Hernandez, 40.

Residents pulled 48 bodies out of the rubble, while dozens more were presumed dead.

"This rescue team arrived today hoping to get people out but I had to tell them everyone was dead," local aid worker Marcos Lopez said.

Rescue workers said they expected to hear of more deaths in remote nearby villages that had yet to be reached.

Floods and mudslides killed almost 2,000 people in southern Mexico and Central America, a region prone to landslides because so many poor villages are perched on steep hillsides.

Guatemala was the country worst hit. A huge mudslide killed up to 1,400 people in the Maya Indian village of Panabaj last Wednesday. Several hundred people died in the rest of the country.

A convoy of two aid trucks took almost 24 hours to reach Tacana from the capital, a journey that would take about a third of that time under normal conditions.

Rivers of rainwater ran across roads covered with huge chunks of fallen earth while green hills were streaked with brown landslides.

The trucks brought needed supplies of pasta, beans and biscuits after the local corn crop was ruined by the rains.