A Hurricane in Honduras

Few of Honduras' impoverished campesinos took much interest in radio reports on the progress of Hurricane Fifi as it churned on a seemingly aimless course off the Central American coast. Only two weeks before, a far more powerful hurricane, dubbed Carmen by meteorologists, had brushed past without inflicting major damage; Fifi sounded as frivolous as its name.

The name belied reality. As Hurricane Fifi slowly swept along the coast, torrential rains on its periphery dumped 20 in. of water on the high Sierra de Omoa in just 40 hours. Rivers and streams swelled uncontrollably, sending walls of water rolling down into the valleys that produce the country's basic crops of bananas, coffee and beans. Entire towns and villages were washed away in the flashfloods. The government set the death toll at 8,000, and even though other estimates put the figure at 2,000, it was the worst disaster in Honduras' recorded history.

In Choloma, a market town of 9,000, the people were awakened at 3 a.m. on Sept. 20 to find their houses rocking under the battering of water that had surged over a nearby riverbank. "It was like a wild thing," Pablo Venture told TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who visited the stricken town last week. "Our house turned over and then vanished. Three of our children completely disappeared." Wiping his eyes with a dirty handkerchief, Juan Ramirez sobbed, "Dios mio! What has happened to us? My wife died, and now the water has taken seven of my beloved grandchildren."

Quick Help. In the Sierra de Omoa, the mountains were gashed with ugly long scars as if Fifi had been a gigantic cat and had clawed out the hillsides and gullies with its nails. Said Farmer Joaquin Ramirez Castro: "Our coffee and beans have all been washed away. Little villages have been swept down the hills with landslides. Some towns have been covered. Others are marooned and need help. I don't know whether my family is living or dead."

Officials moved quickly to burn or bury masses of bloated, mud-caked bodies, but the stench of death was everywhere. A broiling sun soon beat down on the havoc. Stranded children suffered from exposure and sunstroke. One family was rescued after spending four days holding on to high-tension wires just a few feet above the flood waters. At least a dozen people were treated for spider or snake bites after tarantulas and fer-de-lances fled their hiding places in flooded banana groves. An estimated 100,000 people have been left homeless by the hurricane.

Help was quick in coming. The U.S. flew in four HU1 helicopters from the Panama Canal Zone, which surveyed the rubble, and airlifted to safety hundreds clustered on hill tops. In one rescue operation, 34 refugees desperately crowded aboard an HU1 that normally carries 15 people. In the Aguan valley, pilots reported that flood victims battled each other with machetes for food packages delivered in airdrops.

From neighboring Belize (formerly British Honduras), Britain sent in 57 infantrymen with assault craft powered by outboard motors; they rushed food and water to stranded villagers. A Cuban medical brigade of 41, including 21 doctors, treated 900 Hondurans in two days. The U.S., Nicaragua, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, West Germany and even neighboring El Salvador--which has been at odds with Honduras since the two countries clashed in the so-called "soccer war" ignited in 1969 by rioting World Cup fans --pitched in with food and medicine.

Hurricane Fifi's attack on the fragile economy of Honduras--with a population of 2.8 million, it is the poorest of the Central American republics--was calamitous. Average annual income is poverty-line $260 per capita, and Foreign Minister Cesar A. Batres put the cost of the damage at $1 billion, considerably in excess of Honduras' gross national product of $890 million this year. Some experts estimated that almost 50% of this year's food crop was destroyed, raising an immediate specter of starvation for homeless campesinos with no source of income or produce to barter. "People are starving, their supplies were washed away, and there are no stores near their villages," said Honduran Relief Coordinator Lieut. Colonel Eduardo Andino. "They have no way to get food except from us." A natural disaster had become a national disaster.

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