Hurricane John flooding leaves 17 dead, villages devastated in Mexico
1 October 2024, 12:04
Desperate residents in flood-impacted towns organised volunteers to go to outlying areas.
Along Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, floodwaters receded on Monday, leaving behind devastated towns and 17 dead, after John struck the coast once as a hurricane and again as a tropical storm last week.
Desperate residents in the town of Coyuca de Benitez, about 35 miles west of the resort city of Acapulco, organised volunteers to go to outlying areas to burn the bloated bodies of farm animals that drowned.
The carcasses could become a health risk, so teams of townspeople set out with cans of diesel to help them in their grim work.
The Mexican army began delivering aid packages to families in the town that were hit last year by Hurricane Otis and then last week — twice — by John.
Some are becoming so tired of the repeated hurricane impacts every year they have almost given up.
“I don’t want to buy anything anymore, if this is going to continue happening every year,” said Yahaira Garcia Marin, 32, as she began to clear out her shattered house in Coyuca de Benitez.
Ms Garcaa Marin had to flee in the night last week with her 80-year-old grandmother. “It was terrible, we had to grab what little we had and get out,” she recalled.
Outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — whose last day in office was Monday — has not visited the disaster zone, but he confirmed on Sunday that 15 people had died.
Officials in Guerrero state, where both Coyuca and Acapulco are located, said more than three feet of rain had fallen in the region between September 23 when John made landfall to the east of Acapulco as a Category 3 hurricane, and Friday, when the rejuvenated Tropical Storm John came ashore again to the west of Coyuca.
That meant the area got the equivalent of about 80% of the rain it would normally expect to see in a year, in just four or five days.
The rain also set off landslides that collapsed houses and blocked roads in the mountainous terrain behind the coast.
