Hurricane 'Julia' leaves a trail of destruction in Nicaragua

Damage from hurricane 'Julia' on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, this Sunday. MAYNOR VALENZUELA (REUTERS)

Tropical storm

left Nicaragua on Sunday afternoon and left a trail of destruction after fifteen hours of scourge: some 2,000 homes turned into rubble and 3,000 flooded.

More than 1,500 families were affected as it passed through the Caribbean coast of the Central American country as a category one hurricane.

The vice president, Rosario Murillo, stated that there were no fatalities and that the wind and heavy rains only caused considerable material damage.

The Caribbean, the center and the South Pacific of Nicaragua were the areas hardest hit by the gusts and especially the rains that overflowed some 70 rivers.

Despite the fact that

has already left Nicaraguan territory after hitting the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina hard and is heading towards Mexico as a tropical storm, the rainfall will persist at a time when the land is totally saturated .

Before

left Nicaragua, the Sandinista government decreed a red alert for the entire national territory, nullifying the yellow alert imposed on October 8 last.

Vice President Murillo, from her home in Managua, said through the official media that the number of damages may increase in the coming hours.

The authorities have not yet accounted for a large part of the damage caused by the phenomenon.

For his part, Guillermo González, director of the National System for Disaster Prevention, Mitigation and Attention (Sinapred), explained that they have set up more than 600 shelters in the area of

“The vast majority of the people, more than 8,000, were housed in family homes, in solidarity houses, in addition, more than nine shelters and 24 shelters have been used, which have had almost 2,000 people in their midst so that they could face the first moments of the impact of the phenomenon”, González explained.

This Monday, with the floods subsiding, the destruction of houses and streets is much more evident.

In the city of Nandaime, in the department of Granada, the currents lifted cobblestones from the streets, uprooted trees and the residents are now trying to rescue their belongings in the middle of the mud.

For now, communication with the Caribbean region of Nicaragua has not been reestablished in the areas where

moved as a hurricane.

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