The step of hurricane julia exposed four of the six million Nicaraguans who live in the country, the authorities revealed on Wednesday in a preliminary report presented to the representatives of the United Nations cooperation agencies.
The director of the National System for Disaster Prevention, Mitigation and Attention (Sinapred) said during the presentation of the report that Julia was above 123 of a total of 153 municipalities in the country, directly and indirectly to different degrees.
The head of Sinapred indicated that in the face of the emergency, 586 shelters were prepared to be ready for the climatic phenomenon and it was possible to evacuate more than 20,000 inhabitants from the areas of greatest impact and risk.
“As of today we still have 13 shelters, 953 families, almost 4,000 people, and here information that the colleagues were closing down there in Sinapred is still not included,” González said.
For his part, the Minister of Finance and Public Credit, Iván Acosta, stated that Julia caused damage to infrastructure, such as roads, electrical transmission systems, among other things, for which he calculated that the losses are between 160 and 200 million dollars.
According to Acosta, “it is a very important figure to be a very preliminary data” and recalled that the passage of hurricanes Eta and Iota, which hit Nicaragua in 2020, left losses that reached 990 million dollars, which was 8.5 of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
“Here we already have more than 1.5 percent of GDP in the preliminary quantification,” Acosta assured.
Contradictions with deaths
During the presentation, the government ruled out deaths as a consequence of the hurricane, however, independent media such as La Prensa de Nicaragua and Confidencial, the latter owned by journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, account for more than two deaths.
Julia struck as a Category 1 hurricane early Sunday, October 9 with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph), although its winds had dropped to 70 mph (110 kph) by late morning as it moved across Nicaragua with strong rains.
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