News

November 10, 2009

Salvadoran town is hit hard by landslide

Verapaz buries dead after heavy rains unleashed massive flooding, mudslides, killing at least 134.

MARCOS ALEMAN Associated Press Writer

VERAPAZ, El Salvador — Tears streamed down Elsy Portillo’s badly bruised face as she walked Monday behind coffins carrying her mother and only child in this town buried by a massive landslide, one of a series that killed at least 134 people nationwide.

Portillo’s body was flung repeatedly against the walls as she fought to keep her 7-year-old son from being swept away in the powerful river of mud, boulders and floodwaters overtaking their home in the pre-dawn hours Sunday.

The 40-year-old woman survived but said she lost everything she had lived for.

“My little angel was taken away,” she said, sobbing, her right eye swollen shut. “My little angel was taken away.”

Days of heavy rains unleashed massive flooding and mudslides across the mountainous Central American country Sunday.

Hurricane Ida’s presence in the western Caribbean late last week may have played a role in drawing the rain-packed, Pacific low-pressure system toward El Salvador on the other side of Central America, said Dave Roberts, a Navy hurricane specialist at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. Ida weakened Monday as it lost strength over the water on its way to a landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

No place was harder hit than Verapaz, a poor, farming town of 7,000 people on the slopes of the Chichontepec volcano, about 30 miles east of the capital, San Salvador.

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