Tropical depression Eta is advancing and strengthening in the open waters of the Caribbean Sea towards Cuba and Florida, after leaving dozens of deaths and a wake of destruction in Central America, first as a powerful hurricane and then as a tropical storm.
It is located about 80 miles (105 kilometers) from Belize City and its maximum sustained winds increased to 35 miles per hour (55 kilometers per hour).
The Cayman Islands, which Eta will approach this Saturday, are under threat of a tropical storm, according to the latest bulletin from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), which has also recommended Cuba, the northwestern Bahamas, the Keys and South Florida to stay tuned.
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The trajectory of the tropical depression indicates that after approaching the Cayman Islands it will arrive in Cuba on Saturday night or Sunday morning.
Later it will go out to the open sea again, where a further strengthening of its winds is expected on Sunday when it heads for the Keys and the Florida peninsula.
The effects of Eta, which arrived in Nicaragua on Tuesday as a powerful Category 4 hurricane and then passed through Honduras as a storm, have been felt in practically all of Central America, a region vulnerable to natural disasters.
Floods caused by Eta in Central America.EFE
[How and when to prepare for a hurricane or tropical storm]
Dozens of people have died in Central American countries from Nicaragua, where it made landfall in the middle of this week as a category 4 hurricane, to Panama, due to floods that have caused the overflowing of rivers and deadly landslides.
Children float on boards amid flooding from storm Eta.Getty Images
The most lethal consequences of Eta have occurred in Guatemala, where at least fifty people lost their lives due to the landslides that have caused the intense rains, the Government of that country reported this Thursday.
Shortly after Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández asked neighboring Guatemala for help on Thursday to rescue residents stranded near their shared border, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei announced that at least 50 people had died in mudslides. in their own country, most of them in San Cristóbal Verapaz, a remote town with difficult access.
Later, the National Coordinator for Disaster Reduction said that at least 50 people were missing in that town.
[The Eta storm punishes Central America before traveling to Cuba and Florida]
Their slow northward movement through Honduras overflowed rivers, which in turn flooded neighborhoods where families had to climb onto rooftops to wait to be rescued.
Floods caused by storm Eta in Central America.EFE
Marta Julia Portillo, 62, fled her neighborhood in San Pedro Sula on Thursday before dawn along with relatives.
They paused at a gas station on dry ground until they were told to keep going.
"We don't know where to go because we have nowhere to take refuge," he said.
Her son, who stayed at the family home, told her that the water had already reached the third floor.
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"I would say that the national capacity is exceeded by the size of what we are seeing of the impact," said Maite Matheu, director in Honduras of the international humanitarian aid organization CARE.
The group was using its network of contacts in the country to identify the worst hit areas and catalog their most urgent needs.
The Honduran Foreign Minister, Lisandro Rosales, said on Twitter that the “damage that Eta leaves us are enormous, and public finances are at a critical moment due to COVID-19, we called on the international community to accelerate the recovery process and reconstruction ”.
Observers already anticipate that the chaos generated by Eta will pressure more people to emigrate from countries that are already one of the main sources of migrants to the United States in recent years due to violence.
“Right now with this situation, this is going to be an exodus.
Massive exodus of migrants to the north ”, warned Matheu.
River overflowed by heavy rains caused by storm Eta in Central America.Getty Images
Regarding its advance in the Caribbean, "whatever comes out [of Central America] is going to stay for a while," said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University.
"I am not convinced that we are done with Eta," he added.
Once it strengthens again and heads towards Cuba and Florida it could plague those areas for hours as it wanders in a sinuous and very slow way.
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“The winds are not going to be the problem.
The rains are going to be the problem ”, warned Klotzbach.
Eta will become so big, with so much water and so chaotic that it does not have to make landfall in South Florida, already very wet from the rain, to cause chaos, he added.
"Slow, huge and ugly tropical storms can certainly include a rainfall whip even if they don't make landfall," Klotzbach said.
This Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through November 30, has broken records with 28 named storms formed, 11 of which have made landfall in the United States, though none in Florida so far.
With information from AP and EFE
