A Honduran woman who survived six days at sea after being swept away by Hurricane Mitch provided a rare piece of good news yesterday in a region mourning over 9,000 deaths from the storm.
The unidentified woman, clinging to debris in the Caribbean and drifting in and out of consciousness, was picked up by a British naval vessel on Tuesday.
Her husband and three children were also swept out to sea by the storm, but their fates were unknown.
"The capacity to survive in those conditions is absolutely remarkable," a spokesman aboard HMS Sheffield said.
Nicaragua, meanwhile, kept a close eye on an erupting volcano which added to its misery from Mitch, which killed over 9,000 people across Central America and left more than a million stranded by floods and desperate for food and drinking water.
The Cerro Negro volcano was spewing lava, hot gas and flaming rocks just 32 km (20 miles) from the site where as many as 2,000 people were feared buried in an avalanche of mud set off by rains on the neighbouring Casita volcano.
After dissipating for a few days, Mitch had strengthened again and was dumping 7.5-12.5 cm (three to five inches) of fresh rain on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, prompting nervous officials to declare an alert.
Mitch re-formed into a tropical storm on Tuesday, was downgraded to a tropical depression early yesterday, and was expected to regain strength and become a tropical storm again over the Gulf of Mexico later in the day, the US National Weather Service in Miami said.
Mitch was the fourth most powerful Atlantic hurricane this century when it roared out of the Caribbean last week.
Its death toll could still grow sharply as some 13,000 people are missing after hundreds of thousands of homes were swept away.
"I wanted to go before them," a tearful 81-year-old Mrs Carmencita Pascual said during the burial of her two granddaughters, Elva (5) and Maria Mux (7), killed by trees sent crashing down on their home in Guatemala on Sunday.
In Honduras, its fragile economy and cash crops almost totally ruined, the estimated death toll reached 7,000 as rescue workers spread out over the country to dig corpses from the mud.
"The deaths . . . could even surpass this figure," said Col Rene Osorio of the Honduran national emergency commission.
Hundreds of people were still waving desperately from rooftops.
Another 1,350 people have been confirmed dead in neighbouring Nicaragua, where the volcano's eruption was only the latest headache for storm-weary residents.
Nicaraguan radio reported another 1,000 possible dead from massive flooding in Wiwili in the rural mountains of northern Nicaragua, 12 miles (19 km) from the Honduran border, which remains cut off from communication. But officials were sceptical of the claim.
Mexico said it would establish an air bridge to ferry urgently needed supplies to the region, and called on the international community to help.
As the death count soared and economic aid pledges poured in from around the world, beleaguered victims in Nicaragua vented their frustration over inadequate relief efforts on President Arnaldo Aleman.
An angry mob screamed "Murderer" and "We want food" at the President in the city of Leon, about 88 km (55 miles) north-west of Managua. Police officers locked arms to protect the President.
