600 people vanish in Honduran floods

Press, 7 June 1982, Page 6

600 people vanish in Honduran floods

NZPA Tegucigalpa Some 600 people have disappeared in the floods which inundated southern Honduras last month, according to Colonel Carlos Soto, president of the National Emergency Committee. The figure had come from a house-to-house census in the region and confirmed that 200 people had died in the disaster, he said. He gave no details on how the villagers disappeared, but said that the figure could rise when Government

workers driving bulldozers cleared the way to cut-off villages, where residents would be interviewed. A regional rescue official said that 130 of the missing people were feared dead in mud avalanches triggered by the floods. He said that the number of dead in the avalanches would be determined only after the workers using heavy."construction gear had removed the mud smothering sections of hamlets in the counties of Namasigue, El Triunfo and

El Corpus, near the Nicaraguan border. The floods caused by a 10day tropical downpour coinciding with the onset of the rainy season had caused about $l3 million damage to crops, highways and homes in Honduras, officials said _ last week. But in neighbouring Nicaragua. where the storm killed 85 people, damage had approached close to $l9O million, Nicaraguan authorities said.