Hurricane Felix's rains threaten Central America

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, Sep 5 (Reuters) Rains from Hurricane Felix soaked the hill country of Honduras today and threatened to trigger dangerous mudslides and flooding after killing four people in neighboring Nicaragua.

The storm, which was a powerful Category 5 when it struck the Caribbean coast of Central America yesterday, revived memories of Hurricane Mitch, which killed more than 10,000 people in Central America in 1998, many of them in Honduras.

The government evacuated 30,000 people as Felix weakened to a tropical storm and swept westward along the length of the country.

Almost half of the Honduran capital's 800,000 residents live in areas the government considers dangerous, mostly on the sides of mountains prone to mudslides and avalanches of rock.

Others live near rivers that can easily overflow. The city has a history of severe flooding.

''Here it rains for two hours and the city floods. They're saying it could rain for 18 hours and we're preparing for the worst,'' Tegucigalpa Mayor Ricardo Alvarez told Reuters.

Felix damaged the Puerto Cabezas port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and killed at least four people. Winds tore the roofs off houses and uprooted trees, but the damage was not as bad as expected.

''My house felt like it was moving with the wind,'' resident Julio Mena said. Street lights and phone cables lay on the ground.

Thousands sheltered in two schools in the port, home to some 30,000 mostly Miskito Indians.

STORMY TIME Felix came on the heels of another Category 5 storm, the most powerful type. Last month, Hurricane Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico.

It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes made landfall as Category 5 storms in the same season, and the fourth time since records began in 1851 that more than one Category 5 formed in a year.

In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Henriette lashed Mexico's Los Cabos resort on the Baja California peninsula yesterday with winds and rain, after killing a foreign tourist on its approach.

Despite growing consensus that global warming may spawn stronger tropical cyclones, weather experts believe it is too soon to blame climate change for the back-to-back hurricanes.

Felix was due to pass through Honduras on its way to Guatemala, where electoral officials said they had no plans to postpone Sunday's presidential election.

Normally busy shopping malls were nearly empty in Tegucigalpa.

Stores and businesses closed early so their employees could prepare for the storm.

''This scares me because when Hurricane Mitch came, a whole lot of water fell on us,'' 36-year-old waitress Larisa Flores said.

Honduran coffee producers said they did not expect much impact on their crops if Felix keeps to its predicted route, which would take it through the country into Guatemala and then onto Chiapas in southern Mexico. Nicaraguan exporters feared pounding rains could damage their coffee crops.

Felix was unlikely to hit the southern Gulf of Mexico, the home of Mexico's major offshore oil fields.

Elsewhere in the region, a magnitude 5 earthquake hit the Gulf of California near the tip of the Baja California peninsula late yesterday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. It was centered about 163 km from Los Cabos, close to the site of a magnitude 6.3 quake that hit on Saturday.

REUTERS CS RAI1058