Hurricane Felix's top winds weakened slightly to 135 mph as it headed west, but forecasters warned that it could strengthen again and hit the Central American coastline before landfall along the Miskito Coast early Tuesday morning, according to media reports.
From there, it was projected to rake northern Honduras, slam into southern Belize on Wednesday and then cut across northern Guatemala and southern Mexico, well south of Texas, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) based in Miami, Florida.
The storm was following the same path as 1998's Hurricane Mitch, a sluggish storm that stalled for a week over Central America, killing nearly 11,000 people and leaving more than 8,000 missing, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua.
But Felix was expected to keep up its rapid pace, much faster than Mitch.
By Monday afternoon, crashing waves reached some six meters higher than normal on Honduras' coast, but there was no rain yet.
The Nicaraguan government has issued a hurricane warning from Puerto Cabezas northward to the Honduras-Nicaragua border.
A warning means that hurricane conditions -- including sustained high winds -- are expected within 24 hours.
In addition, the Colombian government Monday afternoon issued a tropical storm warning for Isla de Providencia.
"Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion," the advisory from the hurricane center said.
Fast-moving Felix brushed just north of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao -- the "ABC" islands which sit just north of Venezuela -- on Sunday when it was a Category 2 storm, with top winds around 100 mph.
The storm flooded parts of Aruba, but the island escaped major damage.
Felix burgeoned into a Category 5 major hurricane Sunday, the most extreme level on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, and one capable of producing "potentially catastrophic" damage.
This is only the fourth Atlantic hurricane season since 1886 with more than one Category 5 hurricane, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only 31 such storms have been recorded in the Atlantic, including eight in the last five seasons.
Source: Xinhua/agencies
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