Category Five hurricanes are rare. Rarer still is the storm that makes landfall as a Category Five storm—most weaken before hitting land. Yet, exactly two weeks after Hurricane Dean struck the Yucatan Peninsula as a Category Five storm, Hurricane Felix roared ashore as yet another. Felix came ashore over northeastern Nicaragua on September 4, 2007, with sustained winds of 260 kilometers per hour (160 miles per hour), said the National Hurricane Center. Forecasters predicted that Felix would continue to move west over Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. Heavy rain in these mountainous regions could trigger devastating floods and mudslides. This area is the same region which suffered major damage from Hurricane Mitch in 1998 which took a similar track, and was one of the most destructive storms recorded, with some 11,000 deaths. Though better prepared this time for such a storm, many fear a repeat of Mitch’s devastation.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of Hurricane Felix at 10:10 a.m. local time (16:10 UTC) on September 4, 2007. At that time, Felix had slammed into the mountains of Nicaragua inland, and lost enough power to be rated a Category Three status hurricane with sustained wind speeds of 200 km/hr (120 mph). The clear eye present on September 3 the day before was now gone, but the storm retained the tight spiral shape of a very powerful storm.