Rare late-season hurricane strikes Nicaragua coast
Hurricane Otto, an unusually powerful late-season storm, thundered ashore Thursday on the southern Nicaraguan coast in a sparsely populated area, causing mudslides and raising fears of flash flooding as it traveled west across Central America.
Forecasters said 15-20 inches of rain could fall in some areas of northern Costa Rica and southern Nicaragua through Thursday night.
"Recent reports from amateur radio operators indicate that mudslides are occurring over portions of northern Costa Rica," the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory.
The strike was the southernmost landfall for a hurricane in Central America on record, the center said. The storm hit close to the town of San Juan de Nicaragua and near the border with Costa Rica, and was expected to weaken rapidly to a tropical storm by Thursday night as it moved offshore, the center said.
Thursday afternoon, Otto was located about 60 miles east of San Carlos, Nicaragua.
Maximum sustained winds have decreased to near 100 mph, with higher gusts, as the storm moved across the Central American isthmus. Nearly 15,000 people evacuated from Nicaragua and Costa Rica ahead of the storm's arrival. A national emergency was declared in Costa Rica as the storm approached, Agence France-Presse reported. Otto came ashore as a Category 2 hurricane.
"We have had a lot of rain, and there have been many landslides around our area," Marcia Pike Bunker told Paste BN. Bunker, who lives in Zarcero, Costa Rica, north of San Jose in the mountains, was hunkered down with emergency supplies. She said her community has not had the high winds that were expected, but the fog and rain were continuing. And tremors from a subsequent earthquake made the situation even more alarming, she said.
A combination of storm surge and waves were forecast to raise tidal levels three to five feet above normal, the center said, with storm-caused swells expected to cause life-threatening surf and rip currents over the next several days along the coasts of Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.
Earlier in the week the storm hammered Panama with torrential rains as it moved along the coast and led to three deaths. Even though Otto hit in a lightly populated region, both Costa Rica and Nicaragua feared devastation to the countries' agriculture industry.
Otto “could seriously jeopardize food security for small-holder farmers who rely on maize, beans, cocoa, honey, coffee and livestock for their livelihoods,” Jennifer Zapata, a regional director for Heifer International, a U.S.-based anti-poverty group, told the Associated Press.
The storm is just the third November hurricane to strike Nicaragua. It is the seventh hurricane of the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends Wednesday. It is also the latest hurricane on record in the Caribbean, according to Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach.
The storm came ashore as a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck about 150 miles off the west coast of nearby El Salvador, shaking the ground across Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The earthquake was deemed to weak to cause a tsunami, said the National Weather Service's National Tsunami Warning Center.
Contributing: Doyle Rice, the Associated Press
Follow Miller on Twitter @susmiller