Mexico has reopened two of its three main oil ports following Hurricane Dean, but officials say production remains suspended as they assess the storm’s impact on the industry. The remnants of Hurricane Dean dumped heavy rain across central Mexico on Thursday.
The threat of serious flooding and mudslides remained as the former Category 5 hurricane diminished to a tropical depression, dropping heavy rain on villages along the mountains of the eastern Sierra Madre.
Forecasters say that as Dean dissipates, it is still expected to produce up to 25 centimeters of rain, triggering life-threatening flash floods and mudslides. Dean first came ashore Tuesday along Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
The storm “continues moving west, and overnight it will reach the city of Queretaro and the central part of country, but it will be much weaker,” said Martin Reyes of Mexico’s National Weather Service.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of damage across the state,” Veracruz Gov. Fidel Herrera told the Televisa television network. In the vanilla-harvest heartland of Papantla, “a huge number of roofs were ripped off houses,” he said.
The storm killed a total of 22 people in Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean region.
Another four people were reported on Thursday to have died in a mudslide in eastern Mexico but that could not immediately be confirmed.
Mexico’s state oil monopoly, Pemex, said oil production, 80 percent of which was cut due to the storm, would begin to return to normal on Friday.