Felix death toll reaches 98

US, Honduran and Nicaraguan soldiers searched remote jungle beaches and the open sea for survivors and bodies after Hurricane Felix claimed at least 98 lives, many of them Miskito Indians who died fleeing the Category 5 storm.

Two days after the storm hit, dozens more bodies were recovered yesterday along the Miskito coastline that stretches across the Nicaragua-Honduras border, including at least 44 Indian fishermen whose bodies were found floating at sea, emergency officials said.

Abelino Cox, a spokesman for the Regional Emergency Committee, said the death toll from Felix had risen to 98, including two people killed in the village of Sing Sing, 40 miles north of Puerto Cabezas.

The storm also destroyed the ethnic Zumo and Mayagna Indian community of Awastingni, 55 miles north west of Puerto Cabezas, Cox said. Fourteen members of the jungle community were missing.

Felix damaged or destroyed nearly 8,000 houses in and around Puerto Cabezas and 18,000 Nicaraguans were living in shelters, civil defence chiefs said.

In Puerto Cabezas, about 500 people crowded on to a pier overlooking the beach where 13 bloated bodies that rescuers fished out of the sea had been laid out on black tarpaulins. Some tried to rush down a small wooden stairway on to the beach but were held back by more than a dozen police officers as forensic specialists inspected the corpses.

Earlier, rescuers found at least 25 bodies floating in waters off Honduras’ coast and another 32 people were still missing after their village was destroyed and the boats they fled on capsized. Some 52 survivors washed ashore or were found clinging to debris. The 25 bodies were included in the death toll of 98.

Aid was arriving slowly in the region, where descendants of Indians, European settlers and African slaves live in stilt homes on island reefs and in small hamlets, surviving by fishing and diving for lobster.

Honduran Col Saul Orlando Coca said US and Honduran military officials were patrolling the sea and inlets with helicopters and boats as soldiers walked beaches on foot. Villagers joined the search, paddling their canoes through waters thick with fallen trees.

Throughout the region, those who survived the storm lacked food and fresh water. A photographer reached one isolated village where the only thing to drink was the water in fallen coconuts.

The Nicaraguan government said it would need at least £15m (€22.2m) to rebuild.

The US Southern Command sent an amphibious warship, the USS Wasp, to Nicaragua to help co-ordinate US relief efforts. Venezuela also sent aid and 57 Cuban doctors and nurses already on medical missions along the Miskito coast helped.

Felix developed very quickly over the deep warm waters of the southern Caribbean. Nicaragua posted a hurricane warning less than 24 hours before it hit the coast, and scrambled to notify the remote, autonomous region where many have a long-standing mistrust of the central government.

Few realised the storm would grow to a Category 5 hurricane so quickly, and some who were warned did not believe it would be so dangerous.

The remnants of Henriette, meanwhile, dumped rain on Arizona and New Mexico yesterday. That hurricane hit Mexico on Tuesday and Wednesday, near Cabo San Lucas and again near the port city of Guaymas, then weakened over the Sonoran desert.

It left 10 dead, including a man who fell while trying to repair his roof. One woman drowned in high surf in Cabo San Lucas, and landslides buried six people in Acapulco as Henriette marched up the Pacific Coast.