Related News
Death toll hits 57 after floods swamp areas of Mexico
Print Edition
The death toll in massive flooding in southern and central Mexico rose to 57 yesterday as desperation mounted in the cut-off resort of Acapulco, where residents looted a store and thousands of exhausted tourists waited to be ferried out by air.
Gun-toting state police guarded the entrance to a Costco store in Acapulco, hours after people looted the partly flooded outlet on one of the city’s main boulevards, carting off shopping carts full of food, clothing, and in some cases flat-screen TVs.
Hundreds of people waded through waist-high brown water in the store’s parking lot, fishing out anything — cans of food or soda — that looters might have dropped. Others shouted for the store to be re-opened.
“If we can’t work, we have to come and get something to eat,” said 60-year-old fisherman Anastasio Barrera, as he stood with his wife outside the store. “The city government isn’t doing anything for us, and neither is the state government.”
Mexico was hit by the one-two punch of twin storms over the weekend, and Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said 57 storm-related deaths had occurred.
The country could get another double blow by week’s end. A tropical disturbance formed over the Yucatan Peninsula and Tropical Depression Manuel — the same storm that battered Acapulco — regained force in the Pacific. It was expected to hit Baja California on the country’s far west as a renewed tropical storm.
With the twin roads from Acapulco to Mexico City closed down, at least 40,000 tourists saw a long holiday beach weekend degenerate into a desperate struggle to get their families back home.
“It’s probably one of the worst holidays I’ve ever been on,” said David Jefferson Gled, a 28-year-old from Bristol, England, who teaches English in Mexico City. “It wasn’t really a holiday, more of an incarceration.”
“It’s horrible. We haven’t eaten anything since nine in the morning,” said Lizbeth Sasia, a 25-year-old teacher from Cuernavaca. “They keep telling us we’ll be on the next flight, but the next flight never comes.”
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
