Dean Bears Down on Mexico's Oil Industry
Pastor Dale Morgan
Dean Bears Down on Mexico's Oil Industry*
By MARK STEVENSON
The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 21, 2007; 7:55 PM
MAJAHUAL, Mexico -- Hurricane Dean swept across the Yucatan peninsula
Tuesday, toppling trees, power lines and houses as it bore down on the
heart of Mexico's oil industry. Glitzy resorts on the Mayan Riviera were
spared, but vulnerable Mayan villages were exposed to the full fury of
one of history's most intense storms.
President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in
Mexico, after Dean killed 13 people in the Caribbean. But driving rain,
poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine
how isolated Mayan communities fared in the sparsely populated jungle
where Dean made landfall as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane.
"It wasn't minutes of terror. It was hours," 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."
One of a handful people to ignore military orders to evacuate, she
weathered the storm in her new brick-walled house with her husband and
7-month-old baby. Winds of 165 mph _ with gusts of 200 mph, faster than
the takeoff speed of many passenger jets _ blew out windows and pulled
pieces from their roof.
Hundreds of homes were collapsed in Majahual when Dean's eye passed
almost directly overhead, crumpling steel girders, splintering wooden
structures and washing 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.
Dean weakened over land but was expected to strengthen as its eye moved
over the Bay of Campeche, home to more than 100 oil platforms and three
major oil exporting ports. The sprawling, westward storm was projected
to slam into the mainland Wednesday afternoon with renewed force near
Laguna Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power plant.
"We often see that when a storm weakens, people let down their guard
completely. You shouldn't do that," said Jamie Rhome at the U.S.
National Hurricane Center. "This storm probably won't become a Category
5 again, but it will still be powerful."
At 5 p.m. EDT, Dean had winds of 80 mph and was centered about 60 miles
west-southwest of Campeche. It was moving west at 20 mph, the National
Hurricane Center said.
While 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from resorts on the Yucatan
peninsula, many poor Indians closer to the storm's direct path refused
military orders to leave their homes, according to Gen. Alfonso Garcia,
who was running shelters in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 60 miles northwest
of Majahual.
Troops evacuated more than 250 small communities, and 8,000 people took
refuge in 500 shelters, said Jorge Acevedo, a Quintana Roo state
spokesman. Others turned away soldiers with machetes and refused to
leave, but some of them changed their minds when the winds and rain
intensified, he said.
Little was known about the thousands who rode out the storm in low-lying
communities of stick huts.
"I'm really worried the hurricane passed over the Mayan communities,
which are the poorest on the Yucatan peninsula," Calderon said before
leaving Canada on a flight to Chetumal to assess the damage.
Mexican officials said they were making slow progress down nearly
impassable unpaved roads to reach these places. In less isolated towns,
people emerged to survey toppled trees and downed power lines
crisscrossing flooded streets.
"If only the government would lend us a hand," said Georgina Hernandez,
59, whose three children all lost their homes in the town of Los Limones.
Dean's path takes it directly through the Cantarell oil field, Mexico's
most productive. The entire field's operations were shut down just ahead
of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil
and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
Insured losses from the storm are likely to range between $750 million
and $1.5 billion, according to Risk Management Solutions, which
calculates hurricane damage for the insurance industry. Most of that
came in Jamaica, which said Tuesday it was postponing Aug. 27 general
elections to survey the damage.
Mexico's insured losses won't exceed $400 million, predicted AIR
Worldwide, another insurance consulting company.
Dean hit Mexico early Tuesday along a sparsely populated coastline, well
to the south of major resorts. The brunt of the storm struck the state
capital of Chetumal, where residents spent a harrowing night with
windows shattering and heavy water tanks flying off rooftops. Sirens
wailed for hours as the storm battered the city, hurling billboards down
streets. The Federal Electricity Commission said 90,000 customers
remained without power by midday.
Electricity was also out to most of Belize, where no deaths or major
injuries were reported. Just south of the Mexican border in Corozal,
Dean flipped a residential trailer, blew roofs from homes and flooded
streets.
Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute said no damage was
reported at any of the archaeological sites in the states of Quintana
Roo and Yucatan. Officials also closed all sites in Campeche and
Veracruz as Dean approached.
The latest forecast put the storm on target to hit land again Wednesday
afternoon at Tecolutla, a coastal river town about halfway between
Tampico and Veracruz. The area is an oil-industry hub, dotted with
derricks and pipelines on land and home to many of the workers who
maintain seven oil platforms a half-hour helicopter ride offshore.
Veracruz has been Mexico's most famed Gulf port since the days of Hernan
Cortez and is famed for its African-inflected music. Tampico, 260 miles
up the coast, is a grittier port city, a center of Mexico's oil industry
in its early days. Between the two is a land of fishing, farming and oil
with a lush, palm-dotted shoreline, cut with rivers flowing into the
usually placid Gulf of Mexico.
North of Veracruz is a strip of resorts known as the Emerald Coast, and
seven more oil platforms are just offshore. Laguna Verde, Mexico's only
nuclear power plant, is only 35 miles to the south, and hundreds of
buses stood by to evacuate workers if necessary.
Dean's projected path is 400 miles south of Texas, where only heavy surf
was expected. The space shuttle Endeavour landed a day early Tuesday
because of the threat NASA had once feared Dean would pose to Mission
Control in Houston.
Calderon cut short a trip to Canada so he could travel to the
hardest-hit areas. President Bush, standing by his side at a summit in
Montebello, offered U.S. aid.
"We stand ready to help," Bush said. "The American people care a lot
about the human condition in our neighborhood, and when we see human
suffering we want to do what we can."
Dean was the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall
since record keeping began in the 1850s. It had a minimum central
pressure of 906 millibars, the third-lowest at landfall after the 1935
Labor Day hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Gilbert, which hit
Cancun in 1988.
"A very low pressure indicates a very strong storm," said meteorologist
Rebecca Waddington.
The deadliest storm to hit Latin America in modern times was 1998's
Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than
8,000 missing, most in Honduras and Nicaragua.
___
Associated Press writers contributing to this report included John Pain
in Miami; Richard Jacobsen in Poza Rica, Mexico; Karla Heusner Vernon in
Ladyville, Belize; Lisa J. Adams in Mexico City; and Michael Melia in
San Juan, Puerto Rico.