Hurricane Felix, which grew with record-breaking speed over the weekend into a Category 5 storm, made landfall this morning in a lightly populated area near the border of Honduras and Nicaragua and continued moving west. Tens of thousands of Hondurans took shelter yesterday but up to 15,000 lacked transport, reports Reuters.
Felix damaged islands along the southern rim of the Caribbean before moving to sea. The storm, which has seesawed between Category 4 and 5, is stronger than Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall in New Orleans 2 years ago. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch killed 10,000 in Nicaragua, where a coffee grower said, "This brings back very difficult memories.” (More Hurricane Felix stories.)