Victims recount horror of mudslide in Mexican village

Rain- soaked hillside leaves dozens buried

ACAPULCO, MEXICO — With a low, rumbling roar, an arc of dirt, rock and mud tumbled down the hillside in the remote mountain village of La Pintada, sweeping houses in its path, burying half the hamlet and leaving 68 people missing in its mad race to the river bed below.

It was the biggest known tragedy caused by twin weekend storms that struck Mexico, creating floods and landslides across the nation and killing at least 97 people as of Thursday — not counting those missing in La Pintada.

All of the nearly 400 surviving members of the village remember where they were at the moment the deadly wave struck on Monday afternoon, Mexico’s Independence Day.

Nancy Gomez, 21, said Thursday that she heard a strange sound and went to look out the doorway of her family’s house, her one- year- old baby clutched in her arms. She saw the ground move, then felt a jolt from behind as her father tried to push her to safety.

She never saw him again. He’s among 68 missing in the slide or a second one that fell and buried victims and would- be rescuers alike.

When the rain- soaked hillside,

I screamed a lot, for them to come rescue me, but I never heard anything from my mother or father or my cousin. Nancy Gomez

drenched by days of rain during Tropical Storm Manuel, gave way, it swept Gomez in a wave of dirt that covered her entirely, leaving only a small air pocket between her and her baby.

“I screamed a lot, for them to come rescue me, but I never heard anything from my mother or father or my cousin,’’ she said as she lay on a foam mattress in a temporary shelter in Acapulco, her legs covered with deep welts. Eventually, relatives came from a nearby house and dug her and the baby out.

The missing from La Pintada were not yet included in the official national death toll of 97, according to Mexico’s federal Civil Protection co- ordinator, Luis Felipe Puente.

Some 35,000 homes across the country were damaged or destroyed.