Poza Rica, Mexico
AP
—
The death toll in Mexico from last week’s heavy rains jumped to 64 on Monday as searches expanded to areas previously cut off by landslides.
Heavy rains in central and southeastern Mexico caused river banks to swell, leaving another 65 people missing, Civil Defense Coordinator Laura Velázquez Arzúa said at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily press briefing.
“We have sufficient resources. We cannot take this lightly, because we are still in a state of emergency,” Sheinbaum said.
Thousands of military personnel are deployed across the region. In northern Veracruz, 80 communities remain without road access.
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.
Early official estimates put the number of damaged homes at 100,000, and in some cases, homes near the river were “virtually wiped out,” Sheinbaum said.
The scale of the destruction across the five states became clearer a day after Mr. Sheinbaum visited affected areas in Puebla and Veracruz and promised to quickly scale up the government’s response.
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.
There was little warning in the oil town of Poza Rica, 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of Mexico City, until the water arrived at dawn Friday. Some neighbors said they sensed the danger hours earlier, grabbed some belongings and fled their homes.
Some people in Poza Rica’s low-lying working-class neighborhood heard the wall of water before they saw it. The loudest sound was when a car crashed into the road, washed away by water running off the banks of the Casones River, flooding the road with more than 12 feet (4 meters).
