Hurricane Eta ground across Nicaragua and Honduras yesterday, causing major flooding, landslides, and wind damage. At least three people have been reported dead, two miners in Nicaragua and a 13-year-old girl in Honduras, all in landslides. The slow-moving storm intensified rapidly before making landfall Tuesday just south of Puerto Cabezas as a strong Category 4 hurricane. Climate change is making rapidly intensifying storms more common and may be linked to storms moving more slowly — leading to increased damage and rainfall as the storms stall over a given area for longer periods of time. Nicaragua’s remote Caribbean coast is home to the country’s Indigenous Miskito people and Afro-Nicaraguan population, who are among the country’s poorest. “This city [Puerto Cabezas] of 70,000 people is very vulnerable. We have houses made of wood and adobe. The infrastructure of the residential houses is our main vulnerability,” Javier Plat, a Catholic priest there, told Reuters. Flooding is also expected across Jamaica, southeastern Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti, and the Cayman Islands. Eta is expected to continue to dump rain across Central America this week, and could move back over the Caribbean to threaten South Florida early next week. (Reuters, The Guardian, Washington Post $, CNN, Weather Channel, AP, USA Today, NPR;  Climate signals Background: Hurricanes; 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season)