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Fifteen minutes before floodwaters entered her home, Lilia Ramírez started running with whatever she could carry.
When she returned she found that not only was there water damage from her first floor to the ceiling, but oil had also spread on her walls.
Poza Rica is an oil town and one of the challenges facing some residents fleeing the floods, which killed at least 64 people in five states and left 65 missing, is the remains of the oil that washed away the town not far from the Gulf of Mexico.
Officials say about 100,000 homes have been damaged across the region by torrential rains and flooding.
“It has never been tarred like this before,” Ms. Ramirez said Monday, standing on her ruined ground floor, where walls that were once pink now have black stripes on them.
Mexico has deployed about 10,000 troops in addition to civilian rescue teams. Helicopters have delivered food and water to about 200 communities cut off from land and evacuated the sick and injured.
“There are enough resources, there will be no skimping on this… because we are still in an emergency period,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing on Monday.
But on some roads in Poza Rica, 275 km northeast of Mexico City, cleanup of mud and debris was complicated by thick oil left on trees, roofs and vehicles by Friday’s torrent of water.
Parts of Veracruz state received 62.7 cm of rain from October 6 to 9.
At other times of heavy rain, state oil company Pemex had drained oil from nearby areas to prevent it from spreading, Ms Ramirez said.
One of his neighbors, Roberto Olvera, said that a siren from the nearby Pemex facility alerted him to the danger.
“It was a really sad moment because a lot of people from the neighborhood were left behind and some people died,” he said.
Pemex said in a brief statement to the AP that so far it had received no reports of oil spills in the area.
Ms. Sheinbaum acknowledged that it could take a few days to establish access to some locations.
“It requires a lot of flights to carry enough food and water to those places,” he said.
The President denied that government systems failed to provide adequate warning. “It would have been difficult to have known about this situation in advance, it is different from a hurricane,” he said.
Mexico’s civil protection agency said heavy rains had killed 29 people by Monday morning in Veracruz state on the Gulf coast and 21 in Hidalgo state north of Mexico City. At least 13 people were killed in Puebla, east of Mexico City. Earlier, a child was killed in a landslide in the central state of Querétaro.
Authorities blamed the deadly rain on two tropical systems that formed off Mexico’s west coast and have since dissipated, Hurricane Priscilla and Tropical Storm Raymond.