Update: Hurricane Iota Threatens Honduras, Nicaragua, Just Days After Storm Eta

Hurricane Iota is set to slam into Central America Monday as the Atlantic’s strongest storm of the year, bringing catastrophic winds and torrential rain to a region still reeling from a storm two weeks ago.

It will hit near the Honduras-Nicaragua border on the heels of Hurricane Eta, which killed more than 100 people. Iota’s winds reached 160 miles (257 kilometers) per hour Monday morning, making it a Category 5 storm — the strongest on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale, the National Hurricane Center said. Landfall will likely come after 8 p.m. New York time.

“Iota is expected to continue to rapidly intensify and could possibly be a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane when it approaches the coast of Central America tonight,” Stacy Stewart, a forecaster at the center, wrote in his outlook. “Flooding and mudslides in Honduras and Nicaragua could be exacerbated by Hurricane Eta’s recent effects there, resulting in significant to potentially catastrophic impacts.”

Iota is the 30th named storm in the Atlantic this year, a record, and it may end up as the season’s strongest. This is the first time the Atlantic has produced two major hurricanes — Category 3 or stronger — in November, according to a tweet by Phil Klotzbach, lead author of the Colorado State University seasonal forecast.

“There’s not much to say about the forecast, it’s straightforward, and Really Really Bad,” Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler with Enki Research, wrote in his blog.

“This is a humanitarian disaster in the making,” said Dan Kottlowski, a meteorologist at commercial forecaster AccuWeather Inc.”Once a storm gets to 155 mph, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it is a massive death producer.”

The storm will devastate the coastal areas with high winds and deadly storm surge before wringing out flooding rains across the mountains of Central America for the next four days.

So many systems have formed in the Atlantic this year that the National Hurricane Center used up its official name list in mid-September and resorted to using Greek letters to designate tropical cyclones. There is a 30% chance another storm could develop off the coast of Central America in five days.