Floods, landslides kill 144 in El Salvador

SAN SALVADOR (AFP) – Rescue workers in El Salvador on Tuesday tried to reach dozens of towns cut off by torrents of mud and debris unleashed by devastating late-season storms that killed at least 144 people.

The total number of dead rose to 144, civil protection authorities said after landslides and overflowing rivers swept away homes, while a raging torrent ripped through part of the town of Verapaz, where bodies -- covered in mud-caked sheets -- were stored in a local chapel, waiting to be identified.

Rescue efforts focused on the eastern San Vicente department, where 72 people were still missing after three days of driving rain, 60 of them in Verapaz alone, officials said late Monday.

"The problem here in finding bodies is removing all these rocks and trees," Carlos Arce, 27, told AFP in what remained of his town of 6,800 after the storm.

Civil protection chief Jorge Melendez warned that "the situation remains grave. We need to open up access routes into about 37 towns which at the moment are totally covered with tonnes of earth, rocks and trees."

The number of people seeking emergency shelter dropped slightly to 12,930, a civil protection official said, while 1,800 homes were damaged or destroyed and 18 bridges and many roads were washed away by the floods.

The mayor of San Vicente said Tuesday that some 500 people were missing on the outskirts of his city, though civil defense officials called the claim "speculation."

"We have 500 missing people, more or less, according to the information people have given us, so that is not official but that is where the information we have gathered is, more or less," Mayor Medadro Hernandez Lara told AFP. Ida not directly behind deadly Salvador floods: experts

Melendez said the disaster at the local level was extreme but cautioned that Lara's claim was "speculation we cannot confirm."

The devastation was initially blamed on Hurricane Ida, which did not hit the country of some seven million people directly but brought heavy rain that affected the entire region.

Meteorologists on Tuesday said however that Ida was not solely to blame.

As Ida was slamming Nicaragua and Honduras "there was another system coming from the eastern Pacific" spreading "very heavy rains over western El Salvador," said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman with the US National Hurricane Center.

"Hurricane Ida was not directly responsible for the grave situation in El Salvador," Feltgen said.

President Mauricio Funes visited Verapaz, where he vowed that "this time, the government will not leave the people alone."

He has requested the national assembly reallocate 150 million dollars from an international loan of 300 million designed for anti-crisis measures.

The National Assembly has declared a "public catastrophe and national disaster" and decreed three days of national mourning for the flood victims.

"There is no doubt that this is a town that has been severely hit by a natural disaster, but it also shows the lack of preventive measures and risk mitigation that could have been carried out years ago," said Funes.

"We must overcome the tragedy... I know that those lives lost simply cannot be replaced."

Help for the flood victims was coming from across the Americas: the United States has donated 100,000 dollars in aid, Brazil 80,000 dollars, and Guatemala has sent rescue workers to help the recovery effort.

The UN World Food Program warned that over the next few days around 10,000 people in El Salvador will need emergency food assistance.

Interior Minister Humberto Centeno said would soon begin evaluating the flood damage, a challenging task in this hilly and mountainous country.

Ida, now weakened to a tropical depression, made landfall in Alabama early Tuesday, lashing the southeastern United States from Louisiana to Florida with winds and rain.

Last week Ida struck neighboring Nicaragua, destroying around 930 homes and leaving some 13,000 people homeless.