Hurricane Dean takes aim at mainland Mexico

Hurricane Dean raked the Mexican mainland Wednesday and battered evacuated oil platforms, forcing thousands to flee as it regained some of the force it unleashed on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Hurricane-force winds were just off the coast of Veracruz state as the sprawling storm grew back to Category 2 status, with winds of 100mph, before an projected midday strike. To the south, the hurricane’s storm surge flooded Ciudad del Carmen, a city of 120,000 people.

Civil defense workers in yellow raincoats joined troops in rousting Tecolutla’s residents and loading them aboard army trucks during a heavy rain for a trip to inland shelters.

Magdalena Gonzalez, 55, clutched a black plastic bag of belongings as she waited for the ride to a shelter, torn between fear of the storm and concern for what she leaves behind.

“I’m afraid it’s going to take my house,” she said.

At least 10,000 others were evacuated in Tuxpan to the north, said Veracruz state Gov. Fidel Herrera.

Dean swept across the Yucatan on Tuesday after making landfall as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane, toppling trees, power lines and houses – but sparing glitzy resorts on the Mayan Riviera.

Miraculously, officials said they had still received no reports of deaths in the Yucatan Peninsula, where the storm hit with its full might, though it earlier killed 13 people in the Caribbean.

Greatly weakened from that overland journey, Dean moved across the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico, home to 100 oil platforms, three major oil exporting ports and the Cantarell oil field, Mexico’s most productive.

The entire field’s operations were shut down just ahead of the storm, reducing the area’s daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Seventy percent of Ciudad del Carmen was flooded Wednesday morning, with water 3 feet deep in many houses, Campeche state Gov Jorge Carlos Hurtado told Mexico’s Televisa network. There, too, no deaths were reported.

The centre of the storm was projected to slam into the mainland around Tuxpan - with hurricane force winds extending out 70 miles. Tropical storm force winds blew 200 miles from the centre.

Coastal Laguna Verde, Mexico’s only nuclear power plant, suspended production.

At 4pm Irish time, Dean was a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 100 mph and was centred about 75 miles east-south-east of Tuxpan, the US National Hurricane Centre said. It was moving west-north-west at about 18mph.

That was up from winds of 80mph a few hours earlier, but still far short of the historic, 165mph winds it had early yesterday, when it was the third-most-intense hurricane ever to strike land in the Atlantic region.

Torrential rains, battering waves and a storm surge of six to eight feet above normal were forecast, and some strengthening was possible over the warm waters of the Gulf before landfall.

The last tourists departed Tuesday from the “Emerald Coast” beaches south of Tecolutla, a getaway on the western Gulf of Mexico where the storm is forecast to hit.

Zbigniew Szadkowski, 50, a physics professor from Lodz, Poland, said he wanted to see a hurricane in action but was leaving anyway with wife Anna, 51.

“I wanted to stay but my wife said no,” he said.

Officials also closed archaeological sites, including the UNESCO world heritage site of El Tajin.

Striking the Yucatan yesterday, Dean was the third most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in recorded history.

“It wasn’t minutes of terror. It was hours. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not,” said Catharine Morales, 30, a native of Montreal, Canada, who has lived in Majahual for a year. “The walls felt like they were going to explode.”

Morales weathered the storm in her new brick-walled house with her husband and 7-month-old daughter Luna. Dean blew out the windows and pulled pieces from their roof.

But they fared better than most: Hundreds of homes in the Caribbean town of Majahual collapsed as Dean crumpled steel girders, splintered wooden structures and washed away about half of the immense concrete dock that transformed the sleepy fishing village into Mexico’s second-busiest cruise ship destination.

The storm surge covered almost the entire town in waist-deep sea water, said fishermen Jorge Gonzalez, 29. He found refuge in the back room of a flooded beachfront store, and had to help his dog Camilo keep his head above the rising tide.

“There came a moment when I thought this was the end,” Gonzalez said.

Little was known about the thousands who rode out the storm in low-lying communities of stick huts.

The space shuttle Endeavour landed a day early Tuesday because of the threat NASA once feared Dean would pose to Mission Control in Houston.