UPDATE
Oct 30, 2023 12:00 AM CDT
At least 48 people died when Category 5 Hurricane Otis slammed into Mexico's southern Pacific coast—most of them in Acapulco—Mexican authorities said Sunday as the death toll continued to climb and families buried loved ones. Mexico's civil defense agency said in a statement that 43 of the dead were in the resort city of Acapulco and five in nearby Coyuca de Benitez, the AP reports. Guerrero state's governor had earlier raised the number of missing to 36 from 10 a day earlier. In Acapulco, families held funerals for the dead on Sunday and continued the search for essentials while government workers and volunteers cleared streets clogged with muck and debris from the powerful Category 5 hurricane.
Oct 28, 2023 12:50 PM CDT
Government workers and volunteers cleared streets, gas station lines wrapped around the block for what gas was to be had, and some lucky families found food essentials as a more organized relief operation took shape Saturday in Acapulco, four days after Hurricane Otis. The aid has been slow to arrive, the AP reports. The Category 5 storm's destruction cut off the city of nearly 1 million people for the first day, and it intensified so quickly on Tuesday that little to nothing had been staged in advance. Authorities had the difficult task of searching for the dead and missing. Many remained incredulous that the government's initial death toll of 27 and four missing had not risen.
A military official who was not authorized to speak about the issue said that officials in his area had found at least six bodies and that his unit had found one. It had been difficult to find bodies because they were often covered by trees and other debris, he said. He was certain there were more deaths than the 27 reported but said that even security forces hadn't been provided an updated figure. Hundreds of families awaited word from loved ones. In another part of the city, Orlando Mendoza, 46, walked down a highway drenched in sweat carrying two bags of tuna, sardines, water, pasta, and soup. He was bringing food to his wife and three young children. "Even though it isn't much, it's something," he said.
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Volunteers from the central state of Puebla who scraped together money to help out people in the city were handing out bags of food to families like Mendoza's gathered on the side of the highway, per the AP. Abel Montoya, 67, had been waiting in line for gasoline with hundreds of other people for an hour and a half Saturday holding an empty jug. Soldiers were overseeing the distribution, presumably to avoid the uncontrolled ransacking of stores that happened across the city in recent days. Gasoline was unavailable not because there wasn't any, but because there was no electricity to operate the pumps. The municipal water system was out because its pumps had no power. All the way down the city's main coastal boulevard, department and grocery stores were left gutted, first by the hurricane and then by residents.
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