Relief work takes shape in Acapulco as residents seek essentials after Otis; official death toll hits 39
Government workers and volunteers cleared streets, gas station lines wrapped around the block, and some lucky families found food essentials as a more organized relief operation took shape Saturday in Acapulco, four days after it was slammed by Hurricane Otis.
The Category 5 storm’s destruction cut off the city of nearly 1 million people for the first day, and it intensified so quickly Tuesday that little to no preparation had been staged in advance.
Security authorities raised the death toll Saturday to 39. The increase came after the initial death toll of 27 had not changed since it was announced Thursday. The storm’s human toll was becoming a point of contention as local media reported the recovery of more bodies. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador criticized his opponents, whom he accused of trying to make the toll a political issue.
Mexico Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said in a recorded video message with López Obrador posted to the online platform X, formerly Twitter, that the cause of death for the 39 was “suffocation by submersion.” She added that investigations continue and that the victims had not yet been identified.
Rodríguez said the number of missing rose to 10. Hundreds of families have been awaiting word from their loved ones.
It had been difficult to locate bodies because they were often covered in trees and other debris, said a military official, who did not want to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
More than two days after Otis struck Acapulco as a Category 5 hurricane, hundreds of thousands of homes are without power and survivors are growing desperate.
Military personnel and volunteers worked along Acapulco’s main tourist strip. They sliced through fallen palm trees and metal signs. Cellphone signals were partly recovered near some of the city’s most luxurious hotels, and authorities placed a charging station for people to charge their phones.
But on the periphery of the city, neighborhoods remained in chaos. The government presence found in the touristic center was not visible in other neighborhoods. With no signal, no water and no food, families and the elderly trudged through foot-deep mud and flooded streets to get to large warehouses someone had found full of food, taking bags of food and liquids.
Orlando Mendoza, 46, walked while drenched in sweat down a highway carrying two bags of tuna, sardines, water, pasta and soup home to his wife and three young children.
“Even though it isn’t much, it’s something,” he said as he walked down the winding mountain highway toward the city center.
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.
Abel Montoya, 67, had been waiting in line for gasoline with hundreds of others for an hour and a half Saturday holding an empty jug. Soldiers were overseeing gas distribution, presumably to avoid the sort of ransacking of businesses that has occurred across the city.
“I need to be able to move to search for water and ice. Now there’s this shortage of food, and I might even have to leave Acapulco, go to Chilpancingo,” the state capital, he said.
Gasoline had been unavailable, not because there wasn’t any, but because there was no electricity to operate the pumps. On Friday, hundreds of people ran outside a supermarket in a seaside working-class neighborhood where men had broken open a gas pump and were filling up empty plastic bottles.
Most families anxiously hunted for water, with some saying they were rationing their supplies. The municipal water system was out because its pumps had no power.
On the city’s main coastal boulevard, department and grocery stores were left gutted, first by the hurricane and then by residents.
Officials said the military presence would grow to 15,000 in the area, and López Obrador called on armed forces to set up checkpoints in the city to avoid robberies.
López Obrador said the national electric company had told him that service had been resumed to 55% of customers in the affected area but that more than 200,000 homes and businesses remained without power.
The federal civil defense agency had tallied 220,000 homes that were damaged by the storm, he said.
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