Hearing of a hurricane making landfall thousands of miles away doesn’t usually make much of an impact on people at Western, but for Terrence McCain, assistant professor of middle grades education, something like this is at the top of his list.

Tuesday, Hurricane Felix made landfall on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border as a Category 5, with windspeeds reaching more than 160 mph, according to the New York Times.

McCain’s wife, Jacqueline Castillo-McCain, is from Honduras. He said they travel to the city of Jesus de Otoro in Honduras a couple of times a year to visit her family and to tend to the farm they have in the area.

After Tuesday’s events, McCain and his wife became extremely concerned, especially after not being able to reach their family in the country, he said.

Their fear stemmed from backlashes of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. because of flooding, landslides and other effects of the heavy rainfall, he said.

“The real danger is the rain,” he said. “They’re expecting over a foot of it. It can cause the roads to be washed away and heavy flooding.”

Castillo-McCain’s family is from Intibuca, a town in the middle of the country that wasn’t affected by the natural disaster.

Her family wasn’t affected, but she feels bad for those who were, she said. The poorer people suffered the most, she said.

Yet her family wasn’t damage-free when Hurricane Mitch hit almost a decade ago. Her uncle lost his house and belongings to Mitch, she said.

“They lost a lot of their life,” she said.

Jenny Ochoa, a recent graduate of Western, is from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This town was only hit by rain, so her family was hardly affected. However, she and her husband Pedro Ochoa, a graduate student from Tela, Honduras, were very worried about their family, she said.

“It’s kind of scary for us because we’re not there, but our family is still there,” she said.

But they were relieved that their families weren’t affected.

“Thank God it was just rain,” she said.

Jenny Ochoa was living in Honduras when Hurricane Mitch hit the country in 1998.

About 10 inches of water filled her house when it hit, she said. She and her family evacuated their home for about a week and had to replace a lot of things when they moved back.

“We were just trying to save our lives,” she said. “That was the most important goal.”

Reach the reporters at diversions@chherald.com