Effects of Hurricane Dean in Mexico - Impact - Second Landfall

Second Landfall

The next day, at 1630 UTC on August 22, Hurricane Dean made a second landfall, this time near the town of Tecolutla, Veracruz, as a Category 2 hurricane. Following the second landfall on the Veracruz coast, two rivers in the mountains of the state of Hidalgo overflowed, and rain fell as far west as the Pacific coast. Veracruz Governor Fidel Herrera said there was "a tremendous amount of damage". Petroleum production was not severely damaged and quickly returned to normal, although its brief interruption was responsible for a 6% year-on-year decrease in third quarter.

Hurricane Dean, at its second landfall, dropped 4 to 8 in (100 to 200 mm) of rainfall across the western states of Jalisco and Nayarit. This rainfall trigged a mudslide in Jalisco which fell on 10 houses and killed one of the occupants. Landslides in Puebla killed five people, and another was crushed when a wall in his house collapsed. One person in Veracruz was electrocuted after touching a power line while repairing his roof. In Michoacán, as the outer bands of the storm swept over the state, a man sheltering under a tree was struck by lightning. Two women died in Hidalgo when heavy rain collapsed their house's roof. Another man drowned while trying to cross a rain-swollen river in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. The heavy rains caused dozens of smaller landslides throughout the country, particularly in Veracruz and Tabasco, but most of them caused no fatalities. At least 50,000 houses were damaged to varying degrees throughout the country. Although Dean's rains caused flooding as far inland as Mexico City, where they closed a portion of Puebla-Mexico highway, the damage was concentrated in the states of Quintana Roo and Veracruz.

As with its first landfall, Hurricane Dean damaged crops throughout its impact area. In Puebla it destroyed 135,000 ha (335,000 acre) of corn and more than 22,000 ha (54,000 acre) of coffee, while in Veracruz 15,000 ha (37,000 acre) of various crops were lost. Unlike in Belize and the Eastern Caribbean, the storm spared the sugarcane crop in Veracruz.

Between the hurricane's two landfall, Dean affected an estimated 207,800 people in the states of Quintana Roo, Campeche, Veracruz, Hildalgo, Puebla and Tabasco. The storm damaged 85 miles (140 km) of power lines and left more than 100,000 people without electricity. Landslides, storm tides, and widespread structural damage combined to compromise water sources throughout the country. The extent of the damage was never calculated at a federal level, but hundreds of villages lost access to fresh water in the days following the storm. Hurricane Dean killed 12 people in Mexico but none of the deaths occurred during its first and most powerful landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula. Between the two landfalls the storm caused a total of Mex$2 billion (US$184 million) of damages.