Dean makes landfall in Mexico for second time

Town in the crosshairs
Although Dean swept over Yucatan as a rare Category 5 hurricane, which is capable of causing catastrophic damage, the storm’s top winds were relatively narrow and appeared to hit just one town: the cruise ship port of Majahual.

The few people who had not evacuated Majahual narrowly escaped with their lives. Dean demolished hundreds of houses, crumpled steel girders, splintered wooden structures and washed away parts of concrete dock that transformed what once was a sleepy fishing village into a top cruise ship destination.

The storm surge covered almost the entire town in waist-deep sea water, said fishermen Jorge Gonzalez, who struggled to keep his dog Camilo above water after taking refuge in a flooded store. “There came a moment when I thought this was the end,” he said.

Tourists reluctantly leave
Information still was sparse about dozens of inland Mayan Indian communities where people living in stick huts rode out the storm. President Felipe Calderon flew over Yucatan to survey damage Wednesday.

Greatly weakened from its trip across the peninsula, Dean moved across the southern Gulf of Mexico, home to 100 oil platforms, three major oil-exporting ports and the Cantarell oil field, Mexico’s most productive. All offshore production was halted ahead of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

The storm surge flooded 70 percent of Ciudad del Carmen, a city of 120,000 where Mexico’s state oil company has major installations. The standing water in the low-lying town was three feet deep in many houses, Campeche Gov. Jorge Carlos Hurtado told the Televisa network.

Alexandre Meneghini / AP People get off a military truck near a shelter in Tecolutla, Mexico, early Wednesday as Dean approaches the state of Veracruz.

But no deaths were reported, and Pemex said its offshore platforms and loading facilities would emerge without major damage.

Mexico also stopped production and evacuated employees from its only nuclear power plant, Laguna Verde, on the Veracruz coast.

Officials closed archaeological ruins, including the UNESCO world heritage site of El Tajin, 20 miles east of Tecolutla.

The last tourists left Tuesday from the beaches of the Emerald Coast, a getaway area where the storm brought battering waves and an expected storm surge of up to eight feet above normal.

“I wanted to stay, but my wife said no,” said Zbigniew Szadkowski, 50, a physics professor from Lodz, Poland.

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