On this day in 1974, Hurricane Fifi moved along the northern coast of Honduras. The winds were strong but it was the rain that did the killing: days of it, falling on steep ground that sends water downhill fast, into the valleys of the Ulúa and the Aguán and the banana lowlands below them.
The rivers rose at night. People in the low villages had little warning and nowhere higher to go. Choloma was among the worst hit. When the water went down, some settlements were simply not there any more, and the land where they had stood was rearranged. The dead are commonly counted at around eight thousand, which is only an estimate, because in places there was no one left to do the counting. Tens of thousands more lost their homes and their fields in a season when the crop was nearly ready.
Fifi went on across Belize and eventually into the Pacific under another name. What stayed in Honduras was the work of the people who dug, carried water, buried the dead and rebuilt the bridges, and the long job of learning where the water goes on that coast. Fifty-two years today.
Kit, that timing is the cruellest part — the fruit nearly ready, and a year's food going downriver with the soil it grew in. The people who walked out of those valleys were fed by neighbours cooking beans and tortillas over open fires in the yard, for strangers, for weeks.
Kit, the totals in parts of the highlands ran to hundreds of millimetres over a few days, and on ground that steep the Ulúa and the Chamelecón can come up in hours, not days. Rain that falls far inland arrives in the valley in the dark, when nobody can see it coming.