91 dead, 60 missing as rain takes toll in El Salvador

EL SALVADOR’S interior minister said the death toll is now 91 from floods and landslides touched off by three days of heavy rains.

Minister Humberto Centeno said 60 people are still missing, and about 7,000 more are in shelters.

He told reporters yesterday that many towns are still cut off and officials have been unable to reach them.

The capital of San Salvador and central San Vicente province are the hardest-hit regions.

Centeno said at least two dozen of the deaths happened in the central San Vicente province. He did not provide details.

Hurricane Ida passed through Nicaragua on Thursday, slamming the country’s Atlantic coast, and damaging or destroying about 500 homes, as well as roads and bridges.

The rains in El Salvador were caused by a low pressure system off the country’s Pacific coast, and while the presence of Ida in the Caribbean may have played some indirect role in helping steer the system, the deaths are not directly linked to the hurricane, said Dave Roberts, a Navy hurricane specialist at the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Florida.

“Because Ida is in the north-west Caribbean, there is a very large weakness in the steering currents in the middle levels of the atmosphere that’s making this thing move on shore near El Salvador from the eastern Pacific,” he said.

“If there were deaths associated with this rainfall amount in El Salvador,

I would not link it to Ida,” Roberts said.