Evacuations ordered as Adrian approaches
Forecasters predict landfall on Thursday
Guatemala City, Guatemala (AP) -- Central American governments summoned boats from the sea and prepared evacuations as the season's first tropical storm headed for their coasts on Wednesday, and a Salvadoran military pilot died in the crash of a small plane he was ferrying out of the storm's path.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said that Tropical Storm Adrian's center could strike near the Guatemala-El Salvador border on Thursday, bringing torrential rains to an area where past flooding has often been devastating.
The pilot was taking a four-seat Cessna away from San Salvador's civilian airport and transferring it to a military base as a precaution in advance of the storm. The plane crashed and burned at a spot about 20 miles southeast of the capital. The pilot was the only person aboard the craft.
Adrian already had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph and it was centered about 230 miles southwest of the coastal border between Guatemala and El Salvador.
El Salvador's government declared a tropical storm warning for the entire country.
Adrian was headed east-northeast, toward the coast, at nearly 8 mph, and forecasters said it could reach hurricane force of 74 mph before making land. The storm's outer bands were already bringing rain to parts of Guatemala on Wednesday.
Adrian grew from a tropical depression into a tropical storm Tuesday afternoon.
The executive secretary for Guatemala's disaster prevention agency, Hugo Hernandez, said that officials were getting set for evacuations and to set up shelters for some of the 400,000 people living in high-risk parts of southern Guatemala.
Guatemala and El Salvador banned all maritime activity along their Pacific coasts, calling on fishermen to return to port.
"We are concerned, though we hope that Adrian changes direction and drops in intensity," said Hugo Arevalo, spokesman for Honduras' emergency commission, which declared a state of alert Tuesday evening.
Many rural Central Americans live in flimsy houses on hillsides or near rivers, so storm-caused flooding can cause disasters. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch, arriving from the Caribbean, killed at least 9,000 people in Central America.
Most Pacific storms tend toward the northwest, marching roughly parallel to the coastline and then edging out to sea or veering inland.
The Hurricane Center said that since 1966, only one tropical depression has ever hit the coasts of Guatemala or El Salvador in May and none have done it so early. The Eastern Pacific hurricane season only began on Sunday.
The Hurricane Center said there was some chance the storm could survive a passage across Central America and emerge, weakened, in the Caribbean as a tropical depression.
