POZA RICA, Mexico (AP) — Fifteen minutes before water from a flooded river flooded her home, Lilia Ramirez started running with what little she could carry. When she returned, she found not only water damage from the ground floor to the ceiling, but also streaks of oil carried by the water on the walls.
Poza Rica is an oil town, and residue from the oil that built the city near the Gulf of Mexico is one of the challenges facing some residents evacuated from floods that killed 64 people and left 65 missing in five states. Officials said about 100,000 homes were damaged across the region. Torrential rain and flooding.
“I’ve never seen anything tarred like this before,” Ramirez said Monday, standing on the dilapidated first floor, where once pink walls have become vertical black stripes.
Mexico is sending about 10,000 troops in addition to civilian rescue teams. Helicopters brought food and water to 200 communities that remained cut off on the ground, and evacuated the sick and injured.
“We have sufficient resources. We cannot take this lightly, because we are still in the state of emergency,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a daily press conference on Monday.
But some roads in Poza Rica, 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of Mexico City, had thick deposits of oil on trees, roofs and vehicles tossed around by ocean currents on Friday, making it difficult to clear mud and debris.
Approximately 62.7 centimeters (62.7 centimeters) of rain fell in parts of Veracruz state from October 6 to 9.
Ramirez said that during other heavy rains, state oil company Pemex drained oil into nearby areas to avoid spreading the rain.
One neighbor, Roberto Olvera, said sirens from a nearby Pemex facility warned of the danger. “It was a really tough moment because a lot of our neighbors were left behind and some died,” he said.
Pemex said in a brief statement to The Associated Press that it has so far received no reports of oil spills in the area.
Scheinbaum acknowledged that it could still be several days before access to some locations is established. “We’re going to need a lot of flights to bring enough food and water” to those locations, she said.
The president denied that the government’s systems failed to provide sufficient warning. “It would have been difficult if we had known about this situation in advance because it is different from a hurricane,” she says.
Mexico’s Civil Protection Agency said heavy rains had killed 29 people in the Gulf state of Veracruz and 21 in Hidalgo state north of Mexico City as of Monday morning. At least 13 people were killed in Puebla, east of Mexico City. Earlier, a child was killed in a landslide in the central state of Queretaro.
Officials believe the cause of the deadly downpour is as follows: two tropical systems Hurricane Priscilla and Tropical Storm Raymond formed off the west coast of Mexico and then dissipated.
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This version corrected Olvera to be a neighbor rather than the stranger’s husband cited in the story.
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