Rains from Hurricane Felix soaked the hill country of Honduras today and threatened to trigger dangerous mudslides and flooding after killing four people in neighboring Nicaragua.
The storm, which was a powerful Category Five when it struck the Caribbean coast of Central America yesterday , revived memories of Hurricane Mitch, which killed more than 10,000 people in Central America in 1998, many of them in Honduras.
The government evacuated 30,000 people as Felix weakened to a tropical storm and swept westward along the length of the country.
Almost half of the Honduran capital's 800,000 residents live in areas the government considers dangerous, mostly on the sides of mountains prone to mudslides and avalanches of rock.
Others live near rivers that can easily overflow. The city has a history of severe flooding.
Felix damaged the Puerto Cabezas port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and killed at least four people. Winds tore the roofs off houses and uprooted trees, but the damage was not as bad as expected.
Thousands sheltered in two schools in the port, home to some 30,000 mostly Miskito Indians.
Felix came on the heels of another Category Five storm, the most powerful type. Last month, Hurricane Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico.
It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes made landfall as Category Five storms in the same season, and the fourth time since records began in 1851 that more than one Category Five formed in a year.