Mexico floods kill 64, destroy 100,000 homes as unexpected storms overwhelm five states

Four days in early October, Mexico's weather turned against itself. A low-pressure system that formed over the Gulf of Mexico collided with a cold front descending from Texas, and the result was rain of a magnitude that authorities later said they had no way to predict. Between October 6 and 9, the deluge fell across five states—Veracruz, Hidalgo, Puebla, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí—turning rivers into torrents, gullies into channels of mud, and hillsides already weakened by earlier rains into slides of earth and debris. When it stopped, 64 people were confirmed dead, 65 more were missing, and more than 100,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed.

In the municipality of Tianguistengo, in Hidalgo state, the damage was concentrated and severe. Miguel Angel Villegas Escobar, the regional director of primary education in the village of Chahuaco, described the scene through WhatsApp voice messages: entire families swept away, whole households buried under mud. He knew of 15 dead in his municipality alone. The neighboring village of Tlacolula, part of the same municipality, had been hit hardest of all. Most of its houses were gone. Two residents remained missing. The primary school—the building that should have stood as a marker of permanence and learning—was now a tangle of mud, brick, and tree trunks, unrecognizable as anything but wreckage.

The isolation was nearly complete. Bridges washed out. Roads disappeared. Landslides cut off entire communities from the rest of the state. In Chahuaco, about 250 kilometers northeast of Mexico City, residents resorted to old trails, loading supplies onto pack animals and horses to reach Tlacolula with aid. The military eventually arrived with two helicopters and began the work of rebuilding what water had taken. But the scale of the need was immense. Across the three hardest-hit states—Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Puebla—56 people had died and more than 100 communities were affected. An airbridge of helicopters was deployed to reach about 60 communities that had been left stranded, some with populations as small as 1,000 people.

What made the disaster sharper was the sense that it might have been anticipated. Authorities had been monitoring two weather systems off the Pacific coast—a potential tropical cyclone called Raymond and a hurricane named Priscilla. But the collision that actually caused the catastrophe came from the Gulf, from a system that formed on October 8 and met the cold front from the north. The conditions were ripe for disaster: the rainy season was ending with rivers and water tables already at capacity, and the hillsides were already compromised by previous rains. Yet the magnitude of what fell from the sky appeared to catch officials unprepared. "There was no scientific condition, meteorologically, that could have told us that the rains would be of this magnitude," President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a press conference on Monday.

But the public was not entirely convinced. Opposition politicians and residents criticized what they saw as a slow response and a failure to issue preventive alerts or evacuations. On Monday morning, a group of residents gathered quietly by the National Palace in Mexico City's historic center, holding signs that asked the president for help for the people of Texcatepec, Veracruz. In Poza Rica, also in Veracruz, frustrated citizens confronted Sheinbaum as she toured the damage, claiming that several university students were missing and demanding more help and equipment. The president acknowledged the frustration. "I got down, personally from the vehicle, to listen to the people," she said. "I explained to them that more help was coming, that no family would be left helpless."

Sheinbaum announced that the federal government, along with state and municipal authorities, had been present helping affected populations. The priority, she said, was opening federal highways first, then state highways, to reach the stranded communities. But the work of rebuilding—of restoring roads and bridges, of accounting for the missing, of housing the displaced—would take far longer than the four days the rain had fallen. In Tlacolula, Villegas Escobar made a direct appeal to the governor of Hidalgo, to local deputies and senators, to come and see what remained. "The people need a lot of help here," he said. The question now was whether the help would arrive in time, and whether the systems meant to protect people from such disasters would be reformed before the next unexpected storm.