Hurricane’s Chaos

HURRICANE Dean swept across Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, toppling trees, power lines and houses as it bore down on the heart of the nation’s oil industry.

Fashionable resorts on the Mayan Riviera were spared, but vulnerable 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 rain forest where Dean made landfall as a ferocious Category Five hurricane.

Hundreds of homes were flattened in Majahual when the hurricane’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 little fishing village into one of Mexico’s busiest cruise ship destinations. The storm put almost the entire town in waist-deep water.

(c) 2007 Evening Chronicle – Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.