With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

THE YEAR
How the wild weather of 1998 broke all records
Lidia Rosa Paz was at a loss. She caught my arm and pointed despairingly
into the raging river. Out there, about 50 yards into the water, was the spot
where, until days before, she had lived. On the night of October 28, 1998, her
shantytown of Pedro Dias, in the town of Choluteca, in Honduras, had been
washed away, taking more than a hundred people to their deaths. Lidia had
survived, but every one of her possessions was gone. "What will I do now?"
she asked. I didn't have an answer.
Hers was one story from a night when floods and landslides ripped apart
the small Central American country's geography, leaving more than 10,000
Hondurans dead and 2 million homeless. It was the night that Hurricane
Mitch, the most vicious hurricane to hit the Americas in 200 years, came
calling, and dumped a year's rain in just a few hours. Choluteca is in
southern Honduras, on the Pacific coast, far from the normal track of
Caribbean hurricanes. When the radio issued storm warnings that night,
neither Lidia nor any of her neighbors took much notice. "Hurricanes never
come here," she told me. Or at least they never had.
I was in Honduras a couple of weeks after the hurricane had struck. The
devastation was appalling. Huge floods had rushed down rivers and into the
capital, Tegucigalpa, in the mountainous heart of the country, ripping away