TEGUCIGALPA, Nov 2: The mayor of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa lived long enough to warn his flood-ravaged city that a potential new disaster was building up-river.Hours later mayor Cesar Castellanos was dead, killed when the helicopter he was travelling in yesterday to inspect the scale of the flood threat, crashed.Castellanos was concerned about debris and driftwood that had choked the flow of the Choluteca river which runs through the centre of the capital, causing the river to back up alarmingly.``If this huge lake which has formed bursts out abruptly, it's going to take out the Chile bridge,'' the mayor said before taking off on the doomed helicopter trip. ``Then the capital will be flooded again.''Honduras, like its neighbours, has been hard hit by the incessant downpours caused by Mitch, one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes of the century that is now dissipating over Central America.Heavy rain last week pushed the Choluteca over its banks, pushing a roof-high flood acrosslarge stretches of Tegucigalpa.The grim death count meanwhile climbed above 1,300 after 610 bodies were pulled from the waterlogged slopes of a Nicaraguan volcano.Officials said the number could soar even higher because up to 1,500 people were feared buried after a week of torrential rains sent tonnes of mud and rocks hurling down the Casita volcano on villages in northwestern Nicaragua.Mitch, since weakened to a tropical depression, was already one of the most deadly storms in the largely impoverished region since Hurricane Fifi killed 3,000 in Honduras in 1974.``We are dealing with a national tragedy which all of Nicaragua is mourning,'' Nicaraguan defence minister Pedro Joaquin Chamorro said.The confirmed deaths from the mudslide brought to 808 the national death count for Nicaragua so far.Overwhelmed officials from Honduras to El Salvador pleaded for disaster relief from rich countries, saying they feared the pile of bodies could surge higher.There were 1,302 known dead across CentralAmerica since Mitch hit land from the Caribbean last Monday when it was the fourth most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, with ``catastrophic'' 295-kph winds.
