One-two punch leaves thousands stranded in Mexico
ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — With a low, rumbling roar, an arc of dirt, rock and mud tumbled down the hillside in the remote mountain village of La Pintada, sweeping houses in its path, burying half the hamlet and leaving 68 people missing in its mad race to the river bed below.
It was the biggest known tragedy caused by twin weekend storms that struck Mexico, creating floods and landslides across the nation and killing at least 97 people as of yestersday — not counting those missing in La Pintada.
All of the nearly 400 surviving members of the village remember where they were at the moment the deadly wave struck on Monday afternoon, Mexico’s Independence Day.
According to Mexico’s federal Civil Protection Coordinator Luis Felipe Puente some 35,000 homes across the country were damaged or destroyed.
Government photos show major mudslides and collapsed bridges on key highways, including the Highway of the Sun, a major four-lane expressway that links Acapulco to Mexico City. All the main arteries to the Pacific Coast resort town remained closed up to yesterday.
Federal officials set up donation centres for storm aid, but they faced stiff questioning about why, instead of warning people more energetically about the oncoming storms, they focused on Independence celebrations and a military parade that kept dozens of aircraft and emergency vehicles in Mexico City, instead of the states where they were most needed. Congressman Manuel Huerta of the leftist Labour Party said “the underlying issue is that the federal government bears a large part of the responsibility for this tragedy”.
Manuel, the same storm that devastated Acapulco, gained hurricane force and rolled into the northern state of Sinaloa yesterday before starting to weaken, falling again to tropical storm strength.
And a tropical disturbance was moving toward Mexico’s soggy Gulf coast even as the country struggles to restore services and evacuate those stranded by flooding from Manuel and Ingrid, which hit the Gulf coast.
Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told local media that conditions were still so unstable in La Pintada on Thursday, three days after the slide, that rescuers hadn’t been able to recover any bodies yet.
So isolated is Acapulco that cargo ships have been contracted to supply food to the city by sea.
Hundreds of stranded tourists remained lined up for a second day at an air base on the outskirts of Acapulco, where military aircraft were slowly ferrying people out of the resort.
Increasingly angry and frustrated by the long wait overnight and in the rain, they began to block army trucks heading into the base with what stranded travellers believed were wealthy, well-connected people or foreigners cutting the line to get a flight out.
Mexican officials said that more than 10,000 people had been flown out of the city on about 100 flights by Wednesday evening, just part of the 40,000 to 60,000 tourists estimated to be stranded in the city.