By Wendy Anders

Hurricane Otto left at least 564 damaged homes as it passed through the municipality of San Juan de Nicaragua, also known as Greytown, on the southeast coast of the country bordering Costa Rica, where it landed on Thursday late morning as a Category 2 hurricane, leaving no casualties so far, authorities said today.

The mayor of San Juan de Nicaragua, Misael Morales, told reporters that that municipality endured the direct impact of Otto for more than three hours, and according to the preliminary reports, 564 houses were left uninhabitable in the urban center.

In the rural areas damages have not been quantified, said Morales.

In San Juan de Nicaragua, a municipality of 2,600 inhabitants, half  of whom are rural dwellers, shelters were set up for hundreds of people, according to Nicaraguan authorities.

The eye of Hurricane Otto, with sustained winds of 175 kilometers per hour, landed on Thursday in that coastal municipality, where the mouth of the San Juan river is also located, according to the Director of Meteorology at the Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies (Ineter), Marcio Roof.

The expert said that Otto landed in San Juan de Nicaragua with gusts of up to 190 kilometers per hour.

So far, authorities have only confirmed other damage on Corn Island, where 12 houses were affected, of which 3 were totally destroyed, and other damage to infrastructure.

The Government of Nicaragua has not yet provided a preliminary tally of the damage caused by Otto, which has since been downgraded to a tropical storm in the Pacific.

In Nicaragua, the government reported Thursday that it maintains the state of national emergency because of Otto, which has already left the territory to the Pacific Ocean.

The eye of Hurricane Otto left Nicaragua on Thursday afternoon without major damage or extraordinary rainfall, according to the first report of the National System for the Prevention, Mitigation and Disaster Relief (Sinapred), which evacuated almost 10,000 people before Otto’s arrival. EFE