Hurricane Otis claims 48 lives while the missing people tally goes to 30 in Mexico

Hurricane Otis: As the death toll from the Category 5 storm continued to rise and families laid loved ones to rest, Mexican authorities reported on Sunday that at least 48 people had perished when Otis struck Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the majority of them in Acapulco.

43 of the fatalities were in the vacation city of Acapulco, while five were in the nearby town of Coyuca de Benitez, according to a statement from Mexico’s civil defense office. The governor of Guerrero state had earlier increased the number of people missing from 10 to 36 the day before. After being upped to 39 by the authorities on Saturday, the death toll went up.

The aftermath of Hurricane Otis

In Acapulco, family buried their loved ones on Sunday and carried on looking for necessities while volunteers and government employees cleaned up the streets after the strong Category 5 hurricane left them blocked with rubble and sludge.

Kathy Barrera, 30, said on Sunday that a landslide covered her aunt’s household, covering their home with loads of stones and sludge. The bodies of her aunt and their three children, ages two to twenty-one, were discovered together with her body. Her uncle remained absent. Barrera’s brother and mother went missing separately as well.

Authorities gave her aunt’s and the youngest two children’s bodies to family members on Sunday. Hearses’ rear was filled with open caskets with bodies wrapped in white bags. The previous day had already seen the burial of the oldest daughter.

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Helpless people looking for their families

Barrera, who had scarcely had time to look for her own mother and brother, expressed her desperation and frustration at the help and staff she had started to see in tourist areas of the city, but not in their neighborhood, which was high on a mountainside struck by landslides, as she got ready to bury her relatives.

“There are many, many people here at the (morgue) that are entire families, families of six, families of four, even eight people,” she said. “I want to ask authorities not to lie … there are a lot of people who are arriving dead.”

At least six families showed up outside the morgue during the little period of time on Sunday morning. Some of them were searching for relatives, some were identifying bodies, and still others were making testimonies to the police. The somber convoys of hearses and relatives crossed much of battered Acapulco en route to the cemetery, passing ransacked stores, streets strewn with debris and soldiers cutting away fallen trees.