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Guatemala storm death toll soars
At least 508 people are now known to have died in Guatemala alone since Tropical Storm Stan pounded Central America and southern Mexico.
Guatemala's losses, said to include many children, bring the overall death toll to at least 610 with El Salvador apparently hit the second-hardest.
Rescuers are struggling to reach hundreds of people still missing in the mudslides and floods.
Many communities remain cut off and more rain is forecast over the weekend.
Rescue efforts in one of the worst-affected areas of Guatemala, around Lake Atitlan, were being hampered by frequent landslides after five days of torrential rain.
The BBC's Mariusa Reyes in Lake Atitlan says the remote Mayan highlands area, popular with tourists, has been transformed into a mud-ridden chaos.
A hillside collapsed on to the lakeside village of Panabaj, swallowing hundreds of homes, officials said.
People in the region say very little help has arrived in their communities and some have not eaten for several days.
"There are no words for this. I have only tears left," teacher Manuel Gonzalez, whose school in Panabaj was destroyed, told Reuters news agency.
"There were only houses here, for as far as you could see... It makes you lose hope. There are no children left, there are no people left."
Presidential visit
Guatemala's President Oscar Berger asked Congress to declare a state of emergency shortly before officials confirmed the death toll of 508.
Across the region, an unknown number of people remain trapped in their houses, correspondents say, with some 200,000 people forced to flee their homes.
Stan slammed ashore as a Category One hurricane in southern Mexico on Tuesday.
Despite being downgraded to a tropical depression by the end of the day, it triggered major flooding and landslides in the region.
Mexico's President Vicente Fox has travelled to the southern Chiapas region, where the town of Tapachula was devastated by floods.
He was expected to spend Saturday touring Chiapas and neighbouring Oaxaca to assess the damage. People in Tapachula's shelters have complained of a lack of food, clothing and basic supplies.
At least 17 people have died in Mexico as a result of Stan, which caused at least 30 rivers to burst their banks.
In El Salvador, at least 67 people are known to have died. Officials said nearly 54,000 others had reached 370 shelters throughout the country.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4322442.stm
Rescuers are struggling to reach hundreds of people still missing in the mudslides and floods.
Many communities remain cut off and more rain is forecast over the weekend.
Rescue efforts in one of the worst-affected areas of Guatemala, around Lake Atitlan, were being hampered by frequent landslides after five days of torrential rain.
The BBC's Mariusa Reyes in Lake Atitlan says the remote Mayan highlands area, popular with tourists, has been transformed into a mud-ridden chaos.
A hillside collapsed on to the lakeside village of Panabaj, swallowing hundreds of homes, officials said.
People in the region say very little help has arrived in their communities and some have not eaten for several days.
"There are no words for this. I have only tears left," teacher Manuel Gonzalez, whose school in Panabaj was destroyed, told Reuters news agency.
"There were only houses here, for as far as you could see... It makes you lose hope. There are no children left, there are no people left."
Presidential visit
Guatemala's President Oscar Berger asked Congress to declare a state of emergency shortly before officials confirmed the death toll of 508.
Across the region, an unknown number of people remain trapped in their houses, correspondents say, with some 200,000 people forced to flee their homes.
Stan slammed ashore as a Category One hurricane in southern Mexico on Tuesday.
Despite being downgraded to a tropical depression by the end of the day, it triggered major flooding and landslides in the region.
Mexico's President Vicente Fox has travelled to the southern Chiapas region, where the town of Tapachula was devastated by floods.
He was expected to spend Saturday touring Chiapas and neighbouring Oaxaca to assess the damage. People in Tapachula's shelters have complained of a lack of food, clothing and basic supplies.
At least 17 people have died in Mexico as a result of Stan, which caused at least 30 rivers to burst their banks.
In El Salvador, at least 67 people are known to have died. Officials said nearly 54,000 others had reached 370 shelters throughout the country.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4322442.stm
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The landslide was believed to be the worst single disaster in several days of flooding that have killed at least 373 people in Central America and southern Mexico
Firefighters and volunteers used hoes, pickaxes, machetes and their bare hands to tear into a hulking mass of mud more than two miles long, pulling out bodies large and small, young and old.
By nightfall Friday, they had pulled 67 bodies from the mountain of mud that buried several towns near Lake Atitlan.
Guatemala bore the brunt of heavy rains exacerbated by Hurricane Stan, which made landfall Tuesday in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Mexico, before quickly weakening into a tropical depression.
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http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/10/08/stan.ap/index.html
Guatemalan officials said 508 people had been killed and 337 others were missing in the country as a result of flooding and mudslides caused by the hurricane that roared across the region last week. More than 100 other deaths have been reported in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
The village of Panabaj on Lake Atitlan, a popular tourist destination in Guatemala's western highlands, was particularly hard hit. Part of a rain-soaked volcano collapsed there early Wednesday, sending down waves of mud, rocks and other debris that killed at least 71 people.
Survivors reported hearing a terrible roar, leading some to believe that an earthquake or volcanic eruption was occurring.
The landslide, which buried several small coffee-growing communities ringing the lake, was believed to be the worst catastrophe spawned by several days of torrential rains. By Saturday, residents of some lakeside communities were speculating that, because so many bodies would not be retrievable, certain areas might have to be designated as mass burial grounds.
Some survivors of the lakeside disaster told reporters that as many as 1,500 people might have been buried in the mudslide in the Santiago Atitlan region. Officials said they had not been able to confirm those reports because the area was inaccessible. Efforts to determine the number of dead and missing have been hindered by rain.
"We cannot confirm what the people of Santiago Atitlan are saying," said Ana Luisa Olmedo of the National Agency for Disaster Control. "Since we cannot confirm the situation there in Santiago, our main priority at the moment is to bring food to the people that have been evacuated."
The center estimates that more than 100,000 Guatemalans in more than 400 communities have been affected by the disaster and that thousands have been evacuated to shelters. Across the country, work crews were using heavy machinery to clear roads and highways of fallen trees and other obstructions.
Across Central America, residents are returning to their villages to discover that their homes and businesses are under water or have been swept away. In some rural communities, entire families have been killed.
In Mexico, in the Atlantic coast state of Veracruz, which Hurricane Stan passed after making landfall Tuesday, at least six people were killed. President Vicente Fox and his wife, First Lady Marta Sahagun, spent Saturday touring devastated areas in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, and joined rescue workers in distributing water, food and clothing.
"It's hard, it's so hard," Fox said on TV from Tapachula, in southern Chiapas near the Guatemalan border, where 2,500 homes were destroyed. "I can understand why the people are crying, why they yell for help."
In many areas, the destruction is the worst suffered since 1998, when Hurricane Mitch tore through the region, leaving more than 10,000 people dead.