Floods in Acapulco

The death toll has reached 80 from the freak confluence of tropical cyclones coming from both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Acapulco was turned into an island, stranding 40,000 people, and 40,000 more people have been displaced. More flooding rain is expected as Tropical Storm Manuel reintensifies and new tropical disturbances hit the battered nation.

Looting hits Acapulco as Mexico storm death toll reaches 80

Looting broke out in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco on Wednesday as the government struggled to reach tens of thousands of people cut off by flooding that had claimed at least 80 lives.

Reuters,

18 September, 2013

Stores were ransacked by looters who carried off everything from televisions to Christmas decorations after floodwaters wreaked havoc in the Pacific port, which has experienced some of the worst storm damage to hit Mexico in years.

Tens of thousands of people have been trapped in the aftermath of two tropical storms that hammered vast swathes of Mexico. More than 1 million people have been affected. Acapulco's airport terminal was under water, stranding tourists.

There was no let-up in sight.

One of the tropical storms, Manuel, became a hurricane late on Wednesday, barreling north along Mexico's northwestern coast and threatening more flooding and mudslides.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said 58 people were still missing from Atoyac, a municipality near Acapulco in Guerrero state. Authorities had recovered 18 bodies earlier in the day.

"There was a massive mudslide that practically buried part of a small community of about 400 people," he said. "Sadly, it looks like they were trapped."

Some 288 people had been rescued from the site and another 91 were still waiting to be evacuated, officials said.

Shops were plundered in the city's upscale Acapulco neighborhood of Diamante, home to luxury hotels and plush apartments, where dozens of cars were ruined by muddy brown floodwaters. Marines were posted outside stores to prevent further theft.

"Unfortunately, it wasn't looting from need of food. It was stealing for stealing's sake," said Mariberta Medina, head of a local hoteliers' association. "They even stole Halloween and Christmas decorations and an outboard motor."

Acapulco's tourist trade was already grappling with a surge in drug gang violence, which earned the city the dubious distinction of Mexico's murder capital last year.

Torrential rains were spawned by two tropical storms, Ingrid and Manuel, which converged on Mexico from the Gulf and the Pacific over the weekend, triggering the flash floods.

Rescue workers in the state of Baja California Sur, home to the popular beach resorts of Los Cabos, prepared to evacuate people from flood-prone areas.

Another area of low pressure over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula has a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours. It is likely to dump more heavy rains across an area already hit by floods and mudslides.

On Wednesday afternoon, national emergency services said they had registered 80 deaths due to the storms.

Hurricane Manuel could dump up to 15 inches of rain in the state of Sinaloa and cause life-threatening flash-floods, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

As the cost of the flooding continued to mount, the Finance Ministry said it had around 12 billion pesos ($925.60 million)available in emergency funding.

EVACUATIONS

The poor weather forced state oil monopoly Pemex to evacuate three oil platforms and halt drilling at some wells. A Pemex official said its refining operations had not been affected and that the company had seven days worth of inventory.

Pemex's refinery in Tamaulipas, its smallest, was partially flooded, but operations were still normal, the firm said. The Transport Ministry said all oil export terminals were open.

The rains pummeled several Mexican states, with Veracruz, Guerrero, Puebla, Hidalgo, Michoacan, Tamaulipas and Oaxaca among the hardest hit.

Landslides have buried homes and a bus in Veracruz on Mexico's eastern seaboard. Thousands were evacuated from flooded areas, some by helicopter, and taken to shelters.

Dozens of homes in Tampico, one of the main Gulf ports north of Veracruz, were waterlogged when the Panuco River burst its banks, forcing evacuations.

Crocodiles swam into the streets of Tampico.

"They don't bother the people," a spokesman for the state government of Tamaulipas said.

The port was operating as normal, he added.

Acapulco is struggling to cope with the downpour that has submerged vast areas of the city, choked its palm-lined streets with mud and stranded about 40,000 visitors.

More than half of the deaths occurred in Guerrero, where Acapulco lies. Despite the loss of life, state Governor Angela Aguirre said the beach resort was "virtually back to normality."

About 5,300 stranded tourists in Acapulco have been taken to Mexico City, said Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico's minister for transport and communications.

But food and bottled water are scarce, and cash has been hard to come by after power outages knocked out bank machines.

"We waited for more than hour to get into a shop and only managed to get instant soup, some tins of tuna and two cartons of milk," said Clemencia Santana Garcia, 45, who sells goods on Acapulco's beaches. "This is going to get ugly."

Mexico floods kill 80, thousands stranded

Oakland Press,

18 September, 2013

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — The toll from devastating twin storms climbed to 80 on Wednesday as isolated areas reported deaths and damage to the outside world, and Mexican officials said that a massive landslide in the mountains north of the resort of Acapulco could drive the number of confirmed dead even higher.

Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said federal authorities had reached the cutoff village of La Pintada by helicopter and had airlifted out 35 residents, four of whom were seriously injured in the slide. Officials have not yet seen any bodies, he said, despite reports from people in the area that at least 18 people had been killed.

“It doesn’t look good, based on the photos we have in our possession,” Osorio Chong said, while noting that “up to this point, we do not have any (confirmed) as dead in the landslide.” Osorio Chong told local media that “this is a very powerful landslide, very big ... You can see that it hit a lot of houses.”

Mayor Edilberto Tabares of the township of Atoyac told Milenio television that 18 bodies had been recovered and possibly many more remained buried in the remote mountain village. Atoyac, a largely rural township about 42 miles (70 kilometers) west of Acapulco, is accessible only by a highway broken multiple times by landslides and flooding.

Ricardo de la Cruz, a spokesman for the federal Department of Civil Protection, said the death toll had risen to 80 from 60 earlier in the day, although he did not provide details of the reports that drove it up.

In Acapulco, three days of Biblical rain and leaden skies evaporated into broiling late-summer sunshine that roasted thousands of furious tourists trying vainly to escape the city, and hundreds of thousands of residents returning to homes devastated by reeking tides of brown floodwater.

The depth of the destruction wreaked by Tropical Storm Manuel hit residents and visitors with full force as Mexico’s transportation secretary said it would be Friday at the earliest before authorities cleared the parallel highways that connect this bayside resort to Mexico City and the rest of the world.

Hundreds of residents of Acapulco’s poor outlying areas slogged through waist-high water to pound on the closed shutters of a looted Costco, desperate for food, drinking water and other basics.

Many paused and fished in the murky waters for anything of value piling waterlogged clothing and empty aluminum cans into plastic bags.

“If we can’t work, we have to come and get something to eat,” said 60-year-old fisherman Anastasio Barrera, as he stood with his wife outside the store. “The city government isn’t doing anything for us, and neither is the state government.”

Manuel re-formed into a tropical storm Wednesday, threatening to bring more flooding to the country’s northern coast. With a tropical disturbance over the Yucatan Peninsula headed toward Mexico’s Gulf coast, the country could face another double hit as it struggles to restore services and evacuate those stranded by flooding from Manuel and Hurricane Ingrid, which hit the Gulf coast over the weekend.

Mexico’s federal Civil Protection coordinator, Luis Felipe Puente, said 35,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.

Elsewhere in the verdant coastal countryside of the southern state of Guerrero, residents used turned motorboats into improvised ferries, shuttling passengers, boxes of fruit and jugs of water across rivers that surged and ripped bridges from their foundations over the weekend. Outside the town of Lomas de Chapultepec, the Papagayo River surged more than 30 feet (9 meters) during the peak of Manuel’s flooding, overturning a bridge that stretched hundreds of feet across the mouth of the river.

In Acapulco’s upscale Diamond Zone, the military commandeered a commercial center for tourists trying to get onto one of the military or commercial flights that remained the only way out of the city. Thousands lined up outside the mall’s locked gates, begging for a seat on a military seat or demanding that airline Aeromexico honor a previously purchased ticket.

“We don’t even have money left to buy water,” said Tayde Sanchez Morales, a retired electric company worker from the city of Puebla. “The hotel threw us out and we’re going to stay here and sleep here until they throw us out of here.”

A lucky few held up ransacked beach umbrellas against the sun. Temperatures were in the mid-80s but felt far hotter. Dozens of others collapsed in some of the few spots of shade, joined there by panting stray neighborhood dogs. Soldiers wandered through the crowds offering lollipops, an offer many greeted with angry disbelief.

“Forty-eight hours without electricity, no running water and now we can’t get home,” said Catalina Clave, 46, who works at the Mexico City stock exchange. “Now all I ask for is some shade and some information.”

Mexico’s federal transportation secretary said that 5,300 people had been flown out of the city on 49 flights by Wednesday afternoon, a fraction of the 40,000 to 60,000 tourists estimated to be stranded in the city.

For many, the lack of clear information was more infuriating than the inability to get home.

“You call and they say come here,” said Patricia Flores, a 35-year-old tourist from the state of Tabasco. “You come here and they say ‘call the call center.’ And the call center doesn’t answer.”

In the low-lying neighborhood of Colosio, residents drove through knee-high brown water to reach homes whose bottom floors were glazed in inches of brown sediment.

“We’re devastated,” said Jorge Luis Pacheco Meijia, a 26-year-old English professor, pausing as he piled sodden, soiled furniture and appliances outside his house. “All the time you spend working from dusk ‘til dawn, everything’s lost.”