Huauchinango: Standing near the lifeless body of her sister, Rosalia Ortega was grateful to have found her in the river Mud, who suddenly swept her house when stormy rain knocked her Mexican mountain town.
At least 47 people have died since Thursday, as floods have created a trace of destruction in the hardest hit states Hidalgo, Puebla, Queretaro and Veracruz.
“We’re sad but at least we’ll give her a Christian funeral,” Ortega told 76, to AFP In the town of Huauchinango in Puebla, a state east of Mexico City, which according to official reports saw nine deaths and significant injury.
The disaster zone is Sierra Madre Oriental, a mountain range that runs parallel to Mexico’s east coast and is overwritten with villages where telecommunications and other services have not yet been restored.
On Thursday, good after dark, a rain -river flooded his banks in Huauchinango and deprived of local residents in their homes within a few minutes and in some cases their loved ones.
That’s what happened to Maria Salas, a 49-year-old chef who shelter from the rain with an umbrella, and saw two soldiers guarding the entrance to her neighborhood.
Salas lost five relatives when their house collapsed and her own home was destroyed by a landslide.
“I can’t get my belongings, I can’t sleep there,” she said. “I have nothing.”
The grieving families are struggling to pay for funerals and, if something is left, to recover something from lost or damaged home.
Huauchinango, with 100,000 inhabitants, is one of the largest communities in the disaster zone and one of very few that could be accessed on Saturday.
Rivers of mud
Floodwaters swept everything on their path and formed heavy rivers of mud that even made intact homes useless.
“It was knee-deep,” says Petra Rodriguez, a 40-year-old houseworker whose house was surrounded by water on both sides.
She, her husband and two sons managed to escape and held her hands, so if the water took one of them, “it would take us all,” she said.
In another part of town, teacher Karina Galicia, 49, showed AFP Her mud -damaged, mugging house. She and her family were able to run out; Had they not, “we would be buried,” she said.
In less damaged houses, neighbors worked to remove water with plastic bottles, tassels and shovels.
Adriana Vazquez, 48, climbed up a hard path of stones and mud to see if there was anything left of a relative’s house.
What she found was a jumble of wood and tin houses corrected by a landslide. Soldiers used a backhoe to remove a pile of garbage from the street.
Her relative “answered the phone,” Vasquez said, but she could hardly hear anything and hoped it was due to a bad connection.
About 100 small communities are uncontactable due to road endings and power cuts that have complicated telephone services and travel.
Mexico has been hit by particularly heavy rain in 2025, with a rainfall record in the capital, Mexico City.
Meteorologist Isidro Cano told AFP That the intense rainfall since Thursday was caused by a seasonal shift and shooting, as hot, moist air from the Mexico golf rises to the mountain peaks.
