Monday, September 6, 2010

Hopes fade for Guatemala landslide victims

BBC: Guatemalan officials say they have given up hope for dozens of people buried when a landslide engulfed a highway north-west of the capital. The mud crashed onto the road as a crowd tried to dig out vehicles buried by a previous landslide. President Alvaro Colom has called the landslides a "national tragedy".

So far 38 people are known to have died but with scores of landslips across the country, there are fears the final number of dead will be much higher. Emergency workers have recovered 20 bodies from the massive landslide that engulfed people as they tried to dig out people caught in an earlier landslide on the Inter-American Highway north-west of Guatemala City.

…Weeks of heavy rain have saturated Guatemala's mountainous terrain, causing hillsides to collapse suddenly. Parts of the country have seen the heaviest rainfall for half a century, according to Guatemala's national meteorological institute….

From 2005, a house in Guatemala engulfed by a landslide, shot by Daniel Sanchez-Bustamante, USAID

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