Floods hit colony

Press, 31 May 1982, Page 9

Floods hit colony

NZPA Hong Kong Mudslips and floods caused by a heavy downpour over 36 hours have left 20 people dead and another 33 injured in Hong Kong. A police spokesman said the 20 reported dead included six children and five women. One person was still missing.

The Fire Department, which has been carrying out emergency work since Friday night, meanwhile, said 33 people had been injured. The Housing Department also indicated that the mudslips and flooding had affected a total of 2472 people, including more than 800 forced to flee their homes since the deluge started on Friday morning.

Authorities said 394.3 mm (nearly 16 inches) of rain had already fallen, resulting in 776 reports of flooding and 131 of landslides.

In Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras in Central America, the authorities have said that rescue teams have found 75 bodies in two isolated villages swamped by floods from a nine-day tropical downpour that has claimed more than 270 lives in Nicaragua and Honduras. The Honduran villages of San Bernardo and Santa Teresa, near the Nicaraguan border, were inundated when two rivers burst their banks, Army rescuers reported. The death toll was put at more than 200 in southern Honduras and 75 in Nicaragua, where officials said the casualty figure could rise when soldiers get through to 25 towns in the north-west cut off by the floods. The Army commandeered private motorboats in its efforts to reach about 15 villages engulfed in a giant lake produced by flooding in the Chinandega province bordering Honduras, a rescue mission spokesman said in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital.