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PUERTO CABEZAS, NICARAGUA - Hurricane Felix ripped into Central America on Tuesday, trashing a port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, killing at least four people and threatening dangerous mudslides in Honduras and Guatemala.
The storm, which hit land as a powerful Category 5 hurricane, ravaged Puerto Cabezas in northern
Nicaragua, where howling winds tore the roofs off homes and shelters and damaged a church.
"My house felt like it was moving with the wind," said resident Julio Mena.
Street lights and phone cables lay strewn across the ground. Uprooted trees flew through the air as thousands sheltered in two schools in the port, home to some 30,000 mostly Miskito Indians.
Four people died in the town and surrounding coastal area, including a young girl.
Felix stoked fears throughout Central America of a repeat of Hurricane Mitch, which killed about 10,000 people across the region in 1998 in floods and mudslides.
Felix came hard on the heels of another Category 5 storm, the most powerful type. Last month, Hurricane Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico.
It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes made landfall as Category 5 storms in the same season, and the fourth time since records began in 1851 that more than one Category 5 had formed in a year.
In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Henriette lashed Mexico's Los Cabos resort on the Baja California peninsula with winds and rain, after killing a foreign tourist on its approach.
Despite growing consensus that global warming may spawn stronger tropical cyclones, weather experts believe it is too soon to blame climate change for the back-to-back hurricanes.
The area where Felix made landfall is sparsely populated and dotted with lagoons and marshes. The storm threatened many Honduran and Guatemalan villages further inland that are perched on hillsides and vulnerable to mudslides.
Felix weakened to a tropical storm as it ploughed through northern Nicaragua on its way toward the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa but was still dangerous.
"We expect it to cause rivers to overflow, mudslides and damage to roads, so we are calling on towns to take preventive measures and evacuate the populations in the most risky areas," said Honduran civil protection officer Jose Ramon Salinas.
About 70,000 Hondurans were evacuated to shelters, but some 15,000 people were unable to find transport and were forced to ride out the storm in their homes.
In Tegucigalpa, residents rushed to buy provisions in a busy supermarket, which in 1998 ended up half under water when a nearby river overflowed from the rains dumped by Mitch.
Norma Rivas loaded powdered milk, cereal, eggs, bread and toilet paper into a taxicab outside the store.
"If there is another catastrophe like the last time, all these kinds of products just run out," said Rivas, who works as a cleaner in a bank.
Authorities in Tegucigalpa told 10,000 people in areas of the city threatened by flooding to evacuate, or risk being forcibly be moved by police if they refused.
Honduran coffee producers said they did not expect much impact on their crops if Felix keeps to its predicted route, which takes it through the country into Guatemala and then Chiapas in southern Mexico. But Nicaraguan exporters feared pounding rains could damage their coffee crops.
In Honduras and Nicaragua, emergency workers took thousands of Miskito Indians out of coastal areas near the border. Some 35,000 of the turtle-fishing Miskitos live in Honduras and more than 100,000 in Nicaragua.
Felix looked unlikely to emerge over the southern Gulf of Mexico, the home of Mexico's major offshore oil fields.
- REUTERS