POZA RICA, Mexico
AP
—
The death toll from last week’s torrential rains in Mexico jumped to 64 on Monday, as searches expanded to communities previously cut off by landslides.
An additional 65 people were missing following the heavy rainfall in central and southeastern Mexico that caused rivers to top their banks, Civil Defense Coordinator Laura Velázquez Alzúa said during President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily press briefing.
“There are sufficient resources, this won’t be skimped on … because we’re still in the emergency period,” Sheinbaum said.
Thousands of military personnel have been deployed across the region. In northern Veracruz, 80 communities remained inaccessible by road.
Sheinbaum acknowledged it could still be days before access is established to some places. “A lot of flights are required to take sufficient food and water” to those places, she said.
Early official estimates note 100,000 affected homes, and in some cases, houses near rivers “practically disappeared,” Sheinbaum said.
The scale of the destruction across five states was coming into clearer focus a day after Sheinbaum visited affected communities in Puebla and Veracruz, promising a rapidly scaled-up government response.
Mexico’s Civil Protection agency said the heavy rains had killed 29 people in Veracruz state on the Gulf Coast as of Monday morning, and 21 people in Hidalgo state, north of Mexico City. At least 13 were killed in Puebla, east of Mexico City. Earlier, in the central state of Querétaro, a child died in a landslide.
In Poza Rica, an oil town 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of Mexico City, there was little warning before the water arrived at dawn Friday. Some neighbors said they sensed danger a couple hours earlier and grabbed a few belongings before abandoning their homes.
Some people in the low-lying working class neighborhoods of Poza Rica heard the wall of water before they saw it. The loudest sound was from the cars crashing together as they were swept along by the water that had escaped from the banks of the Cazones River and flooded the streets with more than 12 feet (4 meters) of water.
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