MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hurricane Mitch was a monster of a hurricane. This was a category five hurricane. It seemed to, it seemed to blow out very quickly -- and gain incredible strength, wind speeds of 180 miles per hour, and it was truly a hurricane, fortunately, we don't see that often.</s>ALFREDO DESARA, VIDEO JOURNALIST: The damage wasn't done by wind. It was done by the three days of rain that had come down over these little working towns. Whole villages had washed off a side of the mountain and all you could see about where they were was just the -- the grass and trees were gone. It was just a mud slide that had taken the whole town with it.</s>RACHEL LEVIN, ASSIGNMENT EDITOR: We went up in a helicopter with Mexican air force, that was delivering food to these towns, that were in these really remote places in the mountains. And we were coming up on a little village that hadn't had food or water for two weeks. And as the helicopter landed, swarms of people started running up to us, and they greeted us, and they kept saying: "Please, please tell the world what is happening to us here. We need food, we need water."</s>SAVIDGE: They had been so badly devastated. It was then that the full extent of what Mitch had done was begun to be known.
CNN 20: 'Mitch' Devastates Central America, October 28, 1998