By Jose Cortes
MARQUELIA, Mexico (Reuters) -Hurricane John threatened southwestern Mexico with severe flooding on Tuesday evening even as it weakened on its trek inland after leaving three people dead and causing severe damage.
Across several Mexican states, authorities were dealing with landslides, uprooted trees and electrical posts, and ripped-off roofs left by the storm on its trajectory after it made landfall on Monday night.
Civil protection authorities and the National Guard were clearing mud, rocks and trees from roads in the Guerrero and Oaxaca states on Tuesday afternoon.
State power firm CFE said it had restored power to seven affected municipalities by Tuesday afternoon, after John initially left nearly 99,000 users without electricity.
Affected areas on Tuesday afternoon were “showing positive progress and recovering basic services, communications and electric power,” Guerrero governor Evelyn Salgado said on social media.
Mudslides claimed the lives of three people in Guerrero, authorities reported: two victims in the small town of Tlacoachistlahuaca and a third in the mountainous municipality of Malinaltepec.
The fatalities were located inland between Puerto Escondido and Acapulco, a major beach resort that was devastated by Hurricane Otis last year.
The affected coastal area is home to both cargo ports and some of the country’s top beach resorts.
Further south in Oaxaca state, the Puerto Escondido and Huatulco airports popular with tourists resumed operations, after being temporarily closed earlier in the morning, as the Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation reported that the facilities had not been affected by John.
Beaches in Puerto Escondido were littered in the aftermath of the storm with debris that included logs, plastics and even household appliances.
Walking across a flooded street in the town of Marquelia, just off Guerrero state’s Pacific coastline, resident Heidi Carrillo worried about the plight of her neighbors.
“What’s needed right now around the beaches is food, because lots of people there were left without their homes and I think they also need clothes,” she said.
Earlier on Tuesday, the national water commission Conagua warned that John dumped “extraordinary” rains of over 10 inches (25 cm) in Oaxaca and Guerrero, among Mexico’s poorest states, with torrential and intense rains also affecting Chiapas, Veracruz, Michoacan and Puebla.
John was downgraded from both hurricane and tropical storm strength over the course of the day on Tuesday as its remnants continued further inland and its maximum sustained winds weakened considerably to 35 miles per hour (56 kph), according to the latest advisory from the U.S. National Hurricane Center.
The center nonetheless flagged the possibility of flash flooding across parts of southwestern Mexico over the next few days.
