Desperation in Mexico resort as storm toll rises

[Bosonic]

Source: AP

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — The death toll in massive flooding in southern and central Mexico rose to 57 on Wednesday as desperation mounted in the cut-off resort of Acapulco, where residents looted a store and thousands of exhausted, despondent tourists waited to be ferried out by air.

Gun-toting state police guarded the entrance to a Costco store in Acapulco, hours after people looted the partly flooded outlet on one of the city's main boulevards, carting off shopping carts full of food, clothing, and in some cases flat-screen TVs.

Hundreds of people waded through waist-high brown water in the store's parking lot on Wednesday, fishing out anything — cans of food or soda — that looters might have dropped. Others shouted for the now-shuttered store to be re-opened.

...

Mexico was hit by the one-two punch of twin storms over the weekend, and Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said 57 storm-related deaths had occurred.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/desperate-thousands-try-escape-cut-acapulco

[AtheistCrusader]

1. Good grief...

I can't even keep up with all the places weather is kicking people in the teeth these days...

[jberryhill]

2. I have a style question on "flat screen TVs"

Is there somewhere that is still selling televisions which do not have flat screens?

[diwali 1103]

6. LOL--like this?

?v=8CF3C5C70B7A2B0

[Sunlei]

3. mexico always got the rainy flash floods. extreme climate change for Acapulco and Colorado.

[Downwinder]

4. If all the goods are water damaged, why not let people

take them. The salvage value is not going to be much.

[Divernan]

5. Soldiers escorted One Percenters to private jets!

Over 40,000 stranded. But not to worry about the One Percenters - they always manage to get by - in luxury!

Families in shorts and sandals waited for as long as eight hours outside the gates of the base, held at bay by rifle-toting soldiers until they were allowed to drag suitcases, pet carriers and red-eyed children across the tarmac, where they jostled furiously for a chance at one of the 150 seats on the next departing Air Force Boeing 727.

By the end of Tuesday, 24 hours after most vacationers were supposed to be back, about 2,750 people had been flown out of Acapulco, the Guerrero state government said. But many still waited miserably on the runway or, worse, with thousands of other sweating, blank-eyed people in a roughly quarter-mile-long line outside the base.

"It's horrible. We haven't eaten anything since nine in the morning," said Lizbeth Sasia, a 25-year-old teacher from Cuernavaca. "They keep telling us we'll be on the next flight, but the next flight never comes."

Adding insult to injury, a few immaculately dressed families skipped the line and were escorted to private jets by soldiers, to the incredulous stares of the sweltering masses

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[blkmusclmachine]

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