Roxanne Sinks Barge Off Mexico, Killing at Least 3 : Hurricane: Tugboats rescue 219 of the 244 aboard the craft as the storm slams ashore for the second time in a week. An American oil worker is among the dead.

At least one U.S. oil worker and two Mexican crewmen were killed and nearly two dozen others were missing Monday after a barge that was shuttling them to offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico sank as Hurricane Roxanne battered the coastline for the second time in a week, the Mexican navy said.

Three tugboats rescued 219 of the 244 workers and crewmen who officials said were on the barge when it sank, according to a navy spokesman, who identified the dead U.S. citizen as Jim Vines and the two Mexicans as radio operator Angel Baltazar Vega and engineer Jose Cruz Navarro. The navy had no immediate information on Vines’ age or hometown.

It was unclear Monday how many of the 30 Americans originally on board when the barge set out from the Yucatan Peninsula port of Campeche on Sunday were among the missing. Two C-130 Hercules aircraft from U.S. Coast Guard stations in Florida and Mississippi were searching a wide area of the Bay of Campeche. A Coast Guard cutter also was en route.

Mexico’s state oil monopoly, Pemex, which the navy said had contracted the pipe-laying barge to transport its workers back to the rigs, offered no immediate comment on why they were sent back to the drilling platforms as Roxanne again was threatening Mexico’s Gulf coast.

Pemex had evacuated those facilities as a safety measure late last week when the hurricane first approached Mexico’s rich offshore oil fields, suspending oil exports and bringing its operations to a near-standstill. A navy spokesman quoted Pemex officials as saying they believed the hurricane threat had passed.

But Mexican and U.S. meteorologists confirmed that a hurricane warning was in effect when the barge set out to sea. Roxanne killed at least six people last week, causing widespread crop damage and waist-high flooding in many parts of the state of Campeche. Mexican television reported that the barge sank while trying to return to shore.

About an hour before the sinking, Pemex issued a communique stating it was aware of Roxanne’s direction and that it had turned back workers who were returning to the rigs.

A spokesman for the barge’s owner, the Campeche-based CCC Construction & Fabrication, said the barge’s crew and passengers all put on life jackets fitted with strobe lights or were boarded onto life rafts before the barge sank.

Meteorologists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said a hurricane warning remained in effect through Monday night along a wide stretch of Mexico’s eastern coastline, from the Yucatan port of Progreso to the port city of Tampico, about 250 miles south of the Texas border. They said the storm was expected to move gradually southwest from the port of Campeche through today, and they predicted flooding of up to six feet above normal tide levels.

Already, officials in Campeche and the neighboring state of Tabasco said thousands were living in emergency shelters. They reported that entire coastal villages had been flooded out and that, in the state of Campeche alone, an estimated 80% of the rice crop had been lost.

The hurricane is the second major natural disaster to torment Mexico during the past week. A 7.6 earthquake centered just off Mexico’s Pacific Coast resort of Manzanillo killed at least 50 people in Mexico’s Colima and Jalisco states a week ago Monday.