Mexico Braces for Second Punch from Dean

CHETUMAL, Mexico — Mexico braced for a second hit Wednesday from powerful hurricane Dean after it plowed across the Yucatan peninsula Tuesday, leaving a wide trail of destruction but initially no reported deaths.

Dean landed as a Category 5 storm on this remote corner of the Mexican coast, flattening entire Mayan villages made of reed huts and palm fronds with gusts over 200 mph.

"Everything is destroyed, look at my roof — it's gone!" said a distraught, Eloise Montalvo Velasquez, 54, who has lived in a low-lying area of Chetumal all her life. Montalvo and her family fled to a relative's home on a nearby hill to avoid the worst of the storm.

"It was horrible," said her sister Beny Montalvo Velasquez, shaking her head as if to rid herself of the memory. "It was like the air was screaming."

Dean was the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since record keeping began in the 1850s. But it spared the popular beach resorts of Cancun and Cozumel, where tens of thousands of tourists were evacuated before the storm passed over remote areas to the south.

The weakened storm rumbled into the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday night, where it menaced more than 100 Mexican oil rigs. Petroleos Mexicanos, the state-owned oil company, evacuated almost 19,000 workers and shut down the Cantarell field, the world's third largest.

After gathering strength again over the Bay of Campeche, Dean was expected to make a second landfall Wednesday afternoon in the heavily populated Mexican state of Veracruz, near Laguna Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power plant.

President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in the Yucatan. Thousands of residents heeded warning to take refuge in emergency shelters, but many remote villages had not been surveyed before nightfall Tuesday. Dean killed 13 people as it churned through the Caribbean over the weekend.

Up and down the Mayan Riviera, so-called for a stretch high end hotels and resorts along the Caribbean, the scenery Tuesday gave witness to the power of Dean: reed shacks lay in piles, metal auditoriums were twisted into unnatural shapes and the jungle canopy was stripped bare by sustained winds of 160 mph, making it look as though it were the dead of winter.

"I'm really worried the hurricane passed over the Mayan communities, which are the poorest on the Yucatan peninsula," Calderon said while attending a summit with President Bush in Canada. Calderon then left to fly to Chetumal, where he was expected to arrive Tuesday evening to assess the damage.

Mexican authorities said roads, many of them unpaved, were nearly impassable, making it difficult to reach isolated towns. Throughout the day, people emerged to survey downed trees and power lines blocking inundated streets.

Dean largely spared the resort city of Cancun, although it was unclear how Cancun's newly restored beach will respond to the tropical storm-like pounding it received. Two years ago, hurricane Wilma erased much of Cancun's famed white sand beach.

Further south, the town of Tulum, famous for its Mayan ruins and turquoise beaches, was not as lucky.

While the ruins appeared intact, great swaths of its beach, including dozens of restaurants, hotels and luxury resort homes, were destroyed.

Pete Milne, an attorney from Tyler, Texas, said his home along the Tulum coast was flattened.

"There was much more destruction along the beach than even Wilma," Milne said. "The lots are stripped bare. All the guard walls are gone. These are multi-gazillion dollar homes."

But the worst damage may have been in Chetumal, capital of Quintana Roo state and a port city that borders Belize. Residents in this city of 120,000 sweated through an unimaginable humidity Tuesday to begin repairs.

Nearly every structure suffered damage, some of it catastrophic. Helicopters patrolled the skies and Mexican soldiers guarded banks.

The National Anthropology and History Institute said no damage was reported at any of the archaeological sites in the states of Quintana Roo and Yucatan.