Seven dead, 100 missing in Mexico landslide

Residents of a remote Mexican town launched a desperate bare-handed effort Tuesday to rescue an estimated 100 people missing after a landslide buried hundreds of homes overnight.

A preliminary death toll was put at seven, but there has been confusion over how many people may have been killed.

Military units and rescue crews with ambulances and helicopters were prevented from reaching the town of Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec by additional landslides that blocked roads and bad weather in the mountainous region, hours after the first wall of mud was unleashed at 3:00 am (0800 GMT).

But the first group of rescue crews led by army troops finally made it through over 12 hours after disaster struck the town of 10,000, located about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of Oaxaca City.

At least seven people were confirmed dead in the disaster, which occurred when a hillside 200 meters (660 feet) wide collapsed in the rain-soaked southern state of Oaxaca, authorities said.

Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz initially told Mexican television that the landslide buried between 100 and 300 homes and that "as many as 1,000" people were feared dead in a region already hit by deadly flooding in the wake of Tropical Storm Matthew.

Ruiz later told Mexican radio that authorities in the town listed seven dead and 100 missing.
Town secretary Donato Vargas said earlier that the El Calvario neighborhood was plunged into confusion and fear as residents looked for at least 400 people missing after the landslide.

It was not immediately clear if the tolls had been revised because survivors had been pulled from the mud and debris, missing residents had been found, or the number of estimated homes buried had changed.

But the death toll was expected to rise, and local officials said they were desperately awaiting a massive rescue operation.

"We fear that the missing are buried inside their homes because they have already searched the surrounding neighborhood," Vargas said.

"Residents of nearby villages came to help dig, many of them with their hands, trying to reach the buried houses."

President Felipe Calderon, who could not get to Oaxaca because of the weather, said in a message on Twitter that there was "serious damage, but perhaps not of the magnitude that was first estimated."

A wide area of Mexico has been devastated this year by what officials describe as the heaviest rains on record.

If fears of hundreds of deaths are realized, the landslide would be the worst single weather-related disaster this year to befall a nation already suffering from a string of hurricanes and tropical storms.

The rains have flooded cities, towns and valleys, destroyed thousands of homes, damaged historic sites and inundated broad stretches of farmland.

Flooding and mudslides have killed at least 80 people since May in Mexico, including in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, where Hurricane Karl left at least 14 people dead and an estimated 400,000 people homeless.

As Mexicans sought to dry out from Karl, they were pounded last week by Tropical Storm Matthew, which quickly weakened and stalled over southern parts of the country, where it unleashed torrential rains.

The US National Hurricane Center, which warned of a heavier-than-usual Atlantic storm season in 2010, said at the time that the system was expected to produce total rain accumulations of 25-50 centimeters (10 to 20 inches).

Suffering along with Mexico has been much of Central America, where flooding and landslides in recent months have killed more than 300 people, left tens of thousands homeless and caused billions of dollars in damage.

This year the region is being swamped by side effects of the La Nina weather phenomenon (the opposite of El Nino). La Nina years are characterized by warmer than normal water temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. That causes some abnormal weather and encourages more tropical storms than usual in the Atlantic.