Hurricane Felix kills 21 on Nicaraguan coast

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua, Sept 5 (Reuters) Hurricane Felix killed at least 21 people on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and over 200 people were missing after the storm laid waste to thousands of flimsy homes, the government said today.

The Navy was trying to reach settlements on marshy spits of land by the sea or on keys to look for more injured or dead from Felix, which crashed into the coast yesterday as an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane.

''There are more than 200 people missing,'' President Daniel Ortega said on a visit to the area. ''We are talking about really serious damage.'' People wept at the harbor in Puerto Cabezas, inhabited mostly by Miskito Indians, for 12 fisherman they said had failed to return from sea.

Ortega said 9,000 homes in the area were destroyed, and residents worked with police and soldiers to try to clear dozens of trees blown uprooted and lying in the street.

Felix revived memories throughout Central America of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in 1998.

The latest storm weakened to a tropical depression after entering Honduras yesterday and residents of the capital, Tegucigalpa, appeared to escape major damage this time around.

Only drizzle fell in the capital, which flooded badly when Mitch rampaged through, and there were no reports of deaths in Honduras.

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

It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes made landfall as Category 5 storms in the same season.

In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Henriette was headed through the Gulf of California toward mainland Mexico today after lashing the Los Cabos resort on the Baja California peninsula with winds and rain.

A foreign tourist walking on the beach in Los Cabos was killed after being dragged away by big waves on Monday as the storm approached.

Coffee producers in both Nicaragua and Honduras said there were no reports of damage to the crop, vital to the two countries' economies.

Despite a 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.

REUTERS PBB RN0310