Category 4 Hurricane Iota makes landfall in Nicaragua

Trees blow in the wind as Hurricane Iota moves toward Nicaragua. — (Image credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Hurricane Iota hit the Nicaraguan coast on Monday night as a powerful Category 4 storm, with sustained winds of 155 mph.

Before slamming into the town of Haulover, Iota barreled across the western Caribbean, strengthening into a Category 5 storm. It is bringing extreme rain and winds to the region, which was hit earlier this month by Hurricane Eta. That storm left 120 people in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala dead due to flooding and mudslides, and the soil in those hardest-hit areas remains saturated with water.

Forecasters say Iota, the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded this late in the season, could bring up to 30 inches of rain to parts of Nicaragua. In Puerto Cabezas, a town about 30 miles north of Haulover, resident Shira Downs told The Washington Post "the winds, the rain, are very strong. I can hear the sound of the sea surrounding us. This is going to be worse than Eta, and this is just the beginning. I just hope God has mercy on us."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.