When the eye crossed land, it was definitely a Category 5, and much of Nicaragua was covered in Category 3 and 4 conditions. I watched a further two hours and then went to bed as the cloud cover dispersed and the wind conditions eased back down to a 4 and then a 3.

Before I went to bed, I perused the feeds for the first reports of damage, although I was expecting a partial news blackout during to communication losses.

I watched Dean as closely two weeks ago, it fizzled really and hit finally as a strong 4. What I noticed about Dean was the massive media coverage. Even good old Walter was mid-Hurricane, doing what he was doing best in his safari shorts and long socks, making an idiot out of himself. I was thinking about the movie The Day After Tomorrow as I watched Walter trying to report mid-hurricane and the part of the movie where the reporter in downtown Los Angeles is reporting on the street and this huge steel sheet comes whipping up the road, just slams into him and takes him out and along with it.

But for Felix, it has been pretty quiet. The mosquito coast is not the sort of place Walter and crew want to vacation in and a hurricane in such a place is even less on their agenda.

Nicaragua doesn't rate. It is not U.S.A. friendly, in fact the opposite and let's face it: If Dean had hit with full intensity, pictures of destroyed Caribbean vacation villas and resorts would have made for great media coverage and could have stretched into weeks of airplay.

But Felix did hit with that intensity and it hit a much weaker area than Dean. It hit villages with wooden and native tree huts. It destroyed one such village, not a building was left untouched, the Catholic church just crumbled. These villages didn't stand a chance. These are the villages we know about. There are hundreds of native Indian villages in the area that do not have phones to ring and warn them that a cat five is on the way.

No brick buildings, no hurricane codes enforced standards of building. No medical, no reinforcements. No massive media on the spot.

Then there is Felix's Factor 2. Felix stalled once again over Nicaragua, just like Mitch did way back. Cyclone Larry a category 5 storm that hit Australia in 2006 was over and gone within around five hours. Not much rain was dumped so there was minimal flooding and slides.

But Felix is dropping a bucketful on Nicaragua and Honduras as it disperses, this will cause massive flooding and landslides in the area that has just been devastated by the Cat five winds. The storm, now that its intensity has dropped is not moving out of the area at the rate it came in. and if a cloud disperses, it's got one choice, down comes the rain.

Sadly, these people face a nightmare of catastrophic proportions over the next week.

This morning the newsfeeds were very sparse on news from the Felix devastated areas. The reports all were headlined similar to "Hurricane Felix downgrades to a cat 2 over land".

That sounds tame. People reading those headlines won't even bother to look at the article, after all Dean was a fizzer and they wasted all that time watching weeks ago and this looks less exciting. Downgraded to a 2 is pretty poor.

But what you don't see at first until buried in the fine print, or lower in the articles, is how Felix did make landfall as a 5 and has kinda hung around, dropping its bucket down and causing even more grief to the inhabitants.

The whole gist of the mainstream articles is that it's okay, not much happened. Until you go looking a bit deeper. Look away from the American-based media and find some other reports, such as the BBC. Now we start to see the true picture emerging. What is being downplaying in the U.S.A. is in fact a monumental disaster with more to come.

Why isn't U.S. reporting it as such? Well, Nicaragua and the U.S.A. are not "Besties" that's for sure. The U.S.A. could just be keeping it quiet because it helps to have Nicaragua suffer and we certainly don't want public outcry to send aid down to help them out of this mess.

Will the American media get on the bandwagon as pictures filter out, or will it be underground reporting and Youtube videos of damage? That remains to be seen. Will it fizzle out and be forgotten within 24 hours?

*****

Well, it's been another 24 hours since my last update and still the U.S.A. news feeds are not really picking up on the scale of the disaster. Two lines stand out from all the news reports so far.

"There were houses flying past with people still in them"
"There are bodies washing up on beaches everywhere"

I think those two lines alone, serve to tell the story of what really happened when Felix hit the "Miskito" coast.

This is truly a disaster of catastrophic proportions, sadly a silent one. For once the media could be helping to alert the world to the plight of these natives and bring them the aid they so desperately need. But no, we have silence and minimalization.

Most of the aid supplies flown in before the hurricane hit were destroyed and damaged. With an official death toll or disaster scale body count of around 40 to 50, depending which newsfeed you are perusing, then not much more aid will be flown in unless the true scale of the disaster is revealed.

When the tsunami hit Asia in 2004, the media coverage was spectacular, the aid was quick to arrive along with helpers and rescuers and re-builders. What chance do these people have? The death toll for this disaster may end up unknown, but at this rate it will be in the hundreds if not thousands.

Nicaragua's president Daniel Ortega, told media outlets yesterday not to report on actual body counts, so as to give searching relatives some hope for finding their missing loved ones. This perhaps has served to downplay the whole disaster in a way. Most people measure a disaster by media body counts. Katrina was a huge disaster with a body count of 1,700, approximately. This one is so far reporting 50 so far with quotes saying "dozens are missing".

What of the two boats with over 40 people aboard that went missing and sent distress calls at the height of the hurricane? What of all the fishermen still missing from villages along the coast?

The event is still being minimalized.

This area is the poorest of the country and long been an issue of contention. The people who reside along the coast often accuse the government of ignoring them. What hope have they got now with all the damage and disaster still not being reported on accurately?

*****

This story was originally published on Margaret's MySpace Blog [1].