After the Deluge
(Excerpted from the November 1999 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

By A.R. Williams

A towering wall of mud, rocks, and uprooted trees rumbled down the south flank of Nicaragua’s Casita Volcano on Friday, October 30, 1998, as men tended their fields of corn, beans, and rice and women cooked the midday meal over woodstoves in villages across the fertile green slope. It had been raining hard the whole week as Mitch—downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm—stalled. Finally the sodden earth at the top of the mountain gave way.

“We heard a sound like a plane, and we thought people had come to rescue us because our houses were filling with rain,” said Vilma Urrutia Martínez, a young mother from the town of Rolando Rodríguez. “But 15 minutes later the land began to tremble, and the mud and stones were on top of us. My children and I went rolling with everything that came down, including pieces of our house.”

When the mudslide ended, a deep orange gash a mile wide and ten miles long ran toward the Pacific coast. Rolando Rodríguez, with 1,600 residents and 176 houses, lost at least 455 people and virtually all its houses. El Porvenir, nearby, was also devastated, losing 79 of its 80 houses and at least 286 of its 700 inhabitants. Several other villages were sideswiped. In all some 2,000 people died.

The Casita disaster was the worst single event during a storm that killed more than 11,000, left more than two million homeless, and caused ten billion dollars [U.S.] in damage across the region. Nearly all of Central America was affected, from Nicaragua and Honduras through El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and southern Mexico. In the history of Atlantic storms only one surpasses Mitch: the Great Hurricane of 1780, which killed 22,000 people in the eastern Caribbean.

The survivors of the mudslide took refuge in schools hastily converted to shelters in towns at the base of the volcano. It was there that I visited them three weeks after the storm. When I met Vilma Urrutia, she was sitting quietly with a few relatives late one afternoon in the courtyard of an elementary school in Chinandega. At the far end two boys bounced a basketball—the only activity amid 65 stunned men, women, and children, many in bandages or casts or using crutches. “We don’t know what to do,” said Vilma’s sister Juana. “We were left with nothing. Nothing.”

Vilma had just lost two of her four children, but it wasn’t until María Urrutia Ramírez, her cousin, began to speak that I began to understand everything they had been through. María, also from Rolando Rodríguez, was 38 years old and eight months pregnant. “I was stuck in mud up to my chest until they rescued me,” she said. “I waited Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday for help.”

In the chaotic aftermath of the storm it had taken several days to get the word out, to round up rescuers and equipment, and to transport everyone over roads and bridges wrecked by flooding.

“I lost my daughter Ana María and her four-month-old son,” María continued. “The current took them away.” Two other children, Martha and Wilber, were also killed, and a 17-year-old daughter, Yasmina, who was in the hospital with a hole punched in her leg by a rock, would die a month later. Her daughters Jessica and Paula and son Yarling were bruised but all right. “My baby’s due in December,” she added in almost a whisper, drained by the physical and emotional shock.

Get the full story in the November 1999 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC.

To help, check this website for relief agencies.

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