Death toll from torrential rains in Mexico rises to 64 as search expands

POZA RICA, Mexico — Fifteen minutes before water from a flooded stream swept into her home, Lilia Ramírez took off running with what little she could carry. When she returned she found not only damage from the water that had flooded her first floor to the ceiling, but the oil it had carried now streaking her walls.

Poza Rica is an oil town, and among the challenges confronting some residents who fled flooding that has killed 64 people across five states and left 65 missing, is residue from the oil that built this city not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Authorities say some 100,000 homes across the region have been damaged by the torrential rains and flooding.

“Never before has it been tarred before like that,” Ramírez said Monday standing in her devastated ground floor, where walls that had once been pink were now vertically striped with black.

Mexico has deployed some 10,000 troops in addition to civilian rescue teams. Helicopters have ferried food and water to the 200 some communities that remained cut off by ground and carried out the sick and injured.

“There are sufficient resources, this won’t be skimped on … because we’re still in the emergency period,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing Monday.

But on some streets in Poza Rica, 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of Mexico City, the cleanup of mud and debris was complicated by thick oil deposits on trees, roofs and vehicles tossed by the current that swept through Friday.

Parts of Veracruz state received some 24.7 inches (62.7 centimeters) of rain from Oct. 6 to 9.

Ramírez said that at other times of heavy rains, the state oil company Pemex had drained nearby areas with oil to avoid it spreading.

Roberto Olvera, one of her neighbors, said that a siren from a nearby Pemex facility alerted them to danger. “It was a really anguishing moment because a lot of people from the neighborhood stayed behind and some perished,” he said.

Pemex said in a brief statement to the AP that so far it did not have reports of an oil spill in the area.

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.

The president denied that government systems had failed to provide sufficient warning. “It would have been difficult to have had much advance knowledge of this situation, (it’s) different from with hurricanes,” she said.

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.

Authorities have attributed the deadly downpours to two tropical systems that formed off the western coast of Mexico and have since dissipated, Hurricane Pricilla and Tropical Storm Raymond.