Tropical Storm Gamma lashed Central America on Saturday and killed at least 12 people, three of them in a plane crash on their way to a luxury jungle lodge owned by film director Francis Ford Coppola.
In Honduras, Gamma's torrential rains, which followed several days of downpours from a cold front, cut off Caribbean coast villages, killed at least nine people and left 14 others missing. Several disappeared when a rescue boat overturned in raging river waters.
Slow-moving Gamma is the 24th named storm of a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season and is cutting an erratic course off the Caribbean coast of Central America and toward Cuba, where it is expected to land on Monday. The storm was not expected to gain strength.

Experts said it would bypass Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, which is recovering from a battering by Hurricane Wilma three weeks ago, and revised earlier predictions to say it probably would not directly hit southern Florida, where Wilma also wreaked havoc.

Tragedy struck near Coppola's Blancaneaux Lodge in the remote mountains of western Belize when a twin-engine plane owned by the resort crashed with a pilot and two guests on board as they flew in for a jungle vacation.

Over 5,000 people were evacuated on Honduras' Caribbean coast and rescue officials said more than 50,000 were cut off as bridges were damaged or destroyed, leaving several cities and towns isolated. Engineers were working to erect temporary bridges in heavy rainfall.

About 60 percent of El Progreso, a city of 200,000 people on a river near the coast, was under water. Rescue workers took boats to isolated communities on the Ulua River to search for stranded residents.
At 10 p.m. EST (0200 GMT on Saturday), Gamma was about 90 miles (145 km) northeast of Limon, Honduras, and was moving northeast at about 6 mph (10 kph) with sustained winds of 45 mph (75 kph).

Honduran officials urged communities cut off by the storm to ration food and water until help arrived.

Gamma was named, like its two predecessors, Alpha and Beta, from the Greek alphabet after the official list of storm names for 2005 was exhausted.

It was first expected to follow the path of Wilma, which battered Mexico's Caribbean resorts of Cancun and Cozumel and then knocked out electricity for 6.5 million people in south Florida.

Earlier in October, Hurricane Stan killed up to 2,000 people in Central America as flash floods and mudslides washed away whole villages.

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans after slamming ashore on Aug. 29, killing more then 1,000 people.

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