Raging flood waters cut off large areas of Central America and southern Mexico today, hurting efforts to rescue victims of mudslides that have killed at least 164 people in the wake Hurricane Stan.
Emergency teams battled to reach remote villages where hillsides collapsed under torrential rains, and thousands of evacuees from urban shantytowns hunkered down in emergency shelters as rain pounded the region.
Villagers, in Cocales, Guatemala, inspect a road made impassable following heavy rain caused by Hurricane Stan
"We have lots of landslides, and some bridges have collapsed," said Benedicto Giron of the civil-protection agency in Guatemala, where at least 20 communities were completely isolated with rescuers were unable to reach them.
"The situation is very delicate. There are many houses damaged and roads covered with landslides," Guatemalan President Oscar Berger said.
Guatemala said it confirmed 79 deaths, and that the toll would surely rise higher. There were at least 62 dead in El Salvador, 10 in both Nicaragua and Mexico and three in Honduras.
The flooding came from storms sparked by Hurricane Stan , which smashed into Mexico from the Atlantic earlier this week.
Stan was only briefly a hurricane and its winds caused moderate damage but several days of rains swelled normally slow rivers into thundering, brown torrents that swept away bridges, houses, roads and trees across the region.
Thousands of homes were destroyed.